Had they been swallows only,
Without the passion stronger
That skyward longs and sings,
Woe's me, I shall be lonely
When I can feel no longer
The impatience of their wings!

A moment, sweet delusion,
Like birds the brown leaves hover;
But it will not be long
Before their wild confusion
Fall wavering down to cover
The poet and his song.

THE PREGNANT COMMENT.

OPENING one day a book of mine,
I absent, Hester found a line
Praised with a pencil-mark, and this
She left transfigured with a kiss.

When next upon the page I chance,
Like Poussin's nymphs my pulses dance,
And whirl my fancy where it sees
Pan piping 'neath Arcadian trees,
Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse,
Still young and glad as Homer's verse.
"What mean," I ask, "these sudden
joys?

This feeling fresher than a boy's?
What makes this line, familiar long,
New as the first bird's April song?
I could, with sense illumined thus,
Clear doubtful texts in Eschylus!"

Laughing, one day she gave the key,
My riddle's open-sesame;

Then added, with a smile demure, Whose downcast lids veiled triumph

The rain fell softly now; the squall, That to a torrent drove the trees, Had whirled beyond us to let fall Its tumult on the whitening seas.

But still the lightning crinkled keen,
Or fluttered fitful from behind
The leaden drifts, then only seen,
That rumbled eastward on the wind.

Still as gloom followed after glare, While bated breath the pine-trees drew, Tiny Salmoneus of the air,

His mimic bolts the firefly threw.

He thought, no doubt, "Those flashes grand,

That light for leagues the shuddering sky,

Are made, a fool could understand,
By some superior kind of fly.

"He's of our race's elder branch

His family-arms the same as ours, Both born the twy-forked flame to launch,

Of kindred, if unequal, powers."

And is man wiser? Man who takes
His consciousness the law to be
Of all beyond his keu, and makes
God but a bigger kind of Me?

SCIENCE AND POETRY.

He who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire

Over the land and through the sea-depths still,

Thought only of the flame-winged mes

senger

As a dull drudge that should encircle

earth

With sordid messages of Trade, and tame Blithe Ariel to a bagman. But the Muse Not long will be defrauded. From her foe

Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch.

The Age of Wonder is renewed again, And to our disenchanted day restores The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to Thought,

with these

I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore, Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay.

A NEW YEAR'S GREETING.

THE century numbers fourscore years;
You, fortressed in your teens,
To Time's alarums close your ears,
And, while he devastates your peers,
Conceive not what he means.

If e'er life's winter fleck with snow
Your hair's deep shadowed bowers,
That winsome head an art would know
To make it charm, and wear it so
As 't were a wreath of flowers.

If to such fairies years must come,
May yours fall soft and slow
As, shaken by a bee's low hum,
The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb,
Down to their mates below!

THE DISCOVERY.

I WATCHED a moorland torrent run
Down through the rift itself had made,
Golden as honey in the sun,
Of darkest amber in the shade.

In this wild glen at last, methought,
The magic's secret I surprise;
Here Celia's guardian fairy caught
The changeful splendors of her eyes.

All else grows tame, the sky's one blut,
The one long languish of the rose,
But these, beyond prevision new,
Shall charm and startle to the close.

WITH A SEASHELL.

SHELL, whose lips, than mine more cold,
Might with Dian's ear make bold,
Seek my Lady's; if thou win
To that portal, shut from sin,
Where commissioned angels' swords
Startle back unholy words,
Thou a miracle shalt see
Wrought by it and wrought in thee;
Thou, the dumb one, shalt recover

Speech of poet, speech of lover.
If she deign to lift you there,
Murmur what I may not dare;
In that archway, pearly-pink
As the Dawn's untrodden brink,
Murmur," Excellent and good,
Beauty's best in every mood,
Never common, never tame,
Changeful fair as windwaved flame ".
Nay, I maunder; this she hears
Every day with mocking ears,
With a brow not sudden-stained
With the flush of bliss restrained,
With no tremor of the pulse
More than feels the dreaming dulse
In the midmost ocean's caves,
When a tempest heaps the waves.
Thou must woo her in a phrase
Mystic as the opal's blaze,
Which pure maids alone can see
When their lovers constant be.
I with thee a secret share,
Half a hope, and half a prayer,
Though no reach of mortal skill
Ever told it all, or will;

Say, "He bids me-nothing moreTell you what you guessed before!"

THE SECRET.

I HAVE a fancy: how shall I bring it
Home to all mortals wherever they be?
Say it or sing it? Shoe it or wing it,
So it may outrun or outfly ME,
Merest cocoon-web whence it broke free?

Only one secret can save from disaster,
Only one magic is that of the Master:
Set it to music; give it a tune,-
Tune the brook sings you, tune the breeze
brings you,

Tune the wild columbines nod to in June!

This is the secret : so simple, you see!
Easy as loving, easy as kissing,

Easy as well, let me ponder-as missing,

Known, since the world was, by scarce two or three.

FITZ ADAM'S STORY.

[The greater part of this poem was written many years ago as part of a larger one, to be called "The Nooning," made up of tales in

verse, some of them grave, some comic. It gives

me a sad pleasure to remember that I was encouraged in this project by my friend the late Arthur Hugh Clough.]

THE next whose fortune 't was a tale to tell

Was one whom men, before they thought, loved well,

And after thinking wondered why they did,

For half he seemed to let them, half forbid,

And wrapped him so in humors, sheath on sheath,

"T was hard to guess the mellow soul beneath;

But, once divined, you took him to your heart,

While he appeared to bear with you as

part

Of life's impertinence, and once a year Betrayed his true self by a smile or tear, Or rather something sweetly-shy and loath,

Withdrawn ere fully shown, and mixed of both.

A cynic? Not precisely: one who thrust Against a heart too prone to love and trust,

Who so despised false sentiment he knew

Scarce in himself to part the false and true,

And strove to hide, by roughening-o'er the skin,

Those cobweb nerves he could not dull within.

Gentle by birth, but of a stem decayed,

But you have long ago raked up their fires;

Where they had faith, you've ten shamGothic spires.

Why more exotics? Try your native vines,

And in some thousand years you may have wines;

Your present grapes are harsh, all pulps and skins,

And want traditions of ancestral bins That saved for evenings round the polished board

Old lava-fires, the sun-steeped hillside's hoard.

Without a Past, you lack that southern wall

O'er which the vines of Poesy should crawl;

Still they're your only hope; no midnight oil

Makes up for virtue wanting in the soil;

Manure them well and prune them; 't won't be France,

Nor Spain, nor Italy, but there's your chance.

-

You have one story-teller worth a score Of dead Boccaccios, nay, add twenty A hawthorn asking spring's most dainty breath,

more,

And him you 're freezing pretty well to death.

However, since you say so, I will tease My memory to a story by degrees, Though you will cry, Enough!' I'm wellnigh sure,

Ere I have dreamed through half my

Overture.

Stories were good for men who had no books,

(Fortunate race!) and built their nests like rooks

In lonely towers, to which the Jongleur brought

His pedler's box of cheap and tawdry thought,

With here and there a fancy fit to see Wrought to quaint grace in golden filigree,

Some ring that with the Muse's finger yet

Is warm, like Aucassin and Nicolete; The morning newspaper has spoilt his trade,

(For better or for worse, I leave unsaid,)