STANZAS FOR MUSIC There be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee; And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me: And the midnight moon is weaving So the spirit bows before thee With a full but soft emotion, Like the swell of Summer's ocean. 'T is time this heart should be unmoved, Yet, though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love! My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone: The hope, the fear, the jealous care, But 't is not thus and 't is not here · Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now Where Glory decks the hero's bier, The sword, the banner, and the field, Awake! (not Greece - she is awake!) Tread those reviving passions down, If thou regret'st thy youth, why live? Is here: up to the field, and give Away thy breath! Seek out less often sought than found - George Gordon Byron DOVER BEACH The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land, Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd! Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, WEST LONDON - Matthew Arnold Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square, A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied. A babe was in her arms, and at her side A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare. Some laboring men, whose work lay somewhere there, Of sharers in a common human fate. "She turns from that cold succor, which attends The unknown little from the unknowing great, And points us to a better time than ours." -Matthew Arnold A SUMMER NIGHT In the deserted, moon-blanch'd street, Down at the far horizon's rim, Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose! And to my mind the thought Is on a sudden brought Of a past night, and a far different scene. Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep The spring-tide's brimming flow Heaved dazzlingly between; Houses, with long white sweep, Girdled the glistening bay; Behind, through the soft air, The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away, That night was far more fair But the same restless pacings to and fro, And the same vainly throbbing heart was there, |