From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye,
That saw thro’ all the Muses’ walk;
To seize and throw the doubts of man;
Impassion’d logic, which outran
The hearer in its fiery course;
But touch’d with no ascetic gloom;
And passion pure in snowy bloom
Thro’ all the years of April blood;
Of freedom in her regal seat
Of England, not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;
In such a sort, the child would twine,
A trustful hand, unasked, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face;
CVIII
The men of rathe and riper years:
The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,
Forgot his weakness in thy sight.
The proud was half disarm’d of pride,
Nor cared the serpent at thy side
To flicker with his treble tongue.
The flippant put himself to school
And heard thee, and the brazen fool
Was soften’d, and he knew not why;
CIX
Along the scale of ranks, thro’ all
To who may grasp a golden ball
By blood a king, at heart a clown;
His want in forms for fashion’s sake,
Will let his coltish nature break
At seasons thro’ the gilded pale:
To whom a thousand memories call,
Not being less but more than all
The gentleness he seem’d to be,
Each office of the social hour,
To noble manners, as the flower
And native growth of noble mind;
Or villain fancy fleeting by,
Drew in the expression of an eye,
Where God and Nature met in light,
CX
That I, who gaze with temperate eyes
On glorious insufficiencies,
Set light by narrower perfectness.
Of all my love, art reason why
I seem to cast a careless eye
On souls, the lesser lords of doom.
Sprang up for ever at a touch,
And hope could never hope too much,
In watching thee from hour to hour,
CXI
Yet how much wisdom sleeps with thee
Which not alone had guided me,
But served the seasons that may rise;
In intellect, with force and skill
To strive, to fashion, to fulfil—
I doubt not what thou wouldst have been:
A soul on highest mission sent,
A potent voice of Parliament,
A pillar steadfast in the storm,
CXII
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.
She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.
She cannot fight the fear of death.
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain
All barriers in her onward race
For power. Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child:
But wisdom heavenly of the soul.
O, friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind,
CXIII
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.
The distance takes a lovelier hue,
And drown’d in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song.
The flocks are whiter down the vale,
And milkier every milky sail
On winding stream or distant sea;
CXIV
That keenlier in sweet April wakes,
And meets the year, and gives and takes
The colours of the crescent prime?
The life re-orient out of dust,
Cry thro’ the sense to hearten trust
In that which made the world so fair.
Upon me, while I muse alone;
The dear, dear voice that I have known
Will speak to me of me and mine:
CXV
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace,
For fuller gain of after bliss:
Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
And unto meeting, when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,
CXVI
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature’s earth and lime;
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place,
If so he type this work of time
And, crown’d with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
And heated hot with burning fears;
And dipp’d in baths of hissing tears,
And batter’d with the shocks of doom
CXVII
So quickly, not as one that weeps
I come once more; the city sleeps;
I smell the meadow in the street;
Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light-blue lane of early dawn,
And think of early days and thee,
CXVIII
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.
CXIX
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done:
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darken’d in the brain.
By thee the world’s great work is heard
Beginning, and the wakeful bird;
Behind thee comes the greater light:
CXX
While I rose up against my doom,
And strove to burst the folded gloom,
To bare the eternal Heavens again,
The strong imagination roll
A sphere of stars about my soul,
In all her motion one with law;
Divide us not, be with me now,
And enter in at breast and brow,
Till all my blood, a fuller wave,
CXXI
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
CXXII
Our dearest faith, our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess;
Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;
Nor thro’ the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun:
I heard a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
CXXIII
Some bitter notes my harp would give,
Yea, tho’ there often seem’d to live
A contradiction on the tongue,
She did but look thro’ dimmer eyes;
Or Love but play’d with gracious lies,
Because he felt so fix’d in truth:
He breathed the spirit of the song;
And if the words were sweet and strong
He set his royal signet there;
CXXIV
And in his presence I attend
To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.
And will be, tho’ as yet I keep
Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompass’d by his faithful guard,
CXXV
Be sunder’d in the night of fear;
Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice across the storm,
And justice, ev’n tho’ thrice again
The red fool-fury of the Seine
Should pile her barricades with dead.
And him, the lazar, in his rags:
They tremble, the sustaining crags;
The spires of ice are toppled down,
CXXVI
Unpalsied when he met with Death,
Is comrade of the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things.
Of onward time shall yet be made,
And throned races may degrade;
Yet O ye ministers of good,
If all your office had to do
With old results that look like new,
If this were all your mission here,
To fool the crowd with glorious lies,
To cleave a creed in sects and cries,
To change the bearing of a word,
To cramp the student at his desk,
To make old baseness picturesque
And tuft with grass a feudal tower;
CXXVII
So far, so near in woe and weal;
O, loved the most when most I feel
There is a lower and a higher;
Sweet human hand and lips and eye,
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine!
CXXVIII
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.
But tho’ I seem in star and flower
To feel thee, some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less:
My love is vaster passion now;
Tho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.
CXXIX
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer’d years
To one that with us works, and trust
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.
Demand not thou a marriage lay;
In that it is thy marriage day
Is music more than any song.
Since first he told me that he loved
A daughter of our house; nor proved
Since that dark day a day like this;
Some thrice three years: they went and came,
Remade the blood and changed the frame,
And yet is love not less, but more;
In dying songs a dead regret,
But like a statue solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm.
Than in the summers that are flown,
For I myself with these have grown
To something greater than before;
As echoes out of weaker times,
As half but idle brawling rhymes,
The sport of random sun and shade.
That must be made a wife ere noon?
She enters, glowing like the moon
Of Eden on its bridal bower:
And then on thee; they meet thy look
And brighten like the star that shook
Betwixt the palms of paradise.
He too foretold the perfect rose.
For thee she grew, for thee she grows
For ever, and as fair as good.
As gentle; liberal-minded, great,
Consistent; wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower.
And I must give away the bride;
She fears not, or with thee beside
And me behind her, will not fear:
That watch’d her on her nurse’s arm,
That shielded all her life from harm
At last must part with her to thee;
Her feet, my darling, on the dead;
Their pensive tablets round her head,
And the most living words of life
The ‘wilt thou’ answer’d, and again
The ‘wilt thou’ ask’d, till out of twain
Her sweet ‘I will’ has made ye one.
Mute symbols of a joyful morn
By village eyes as yet unborn;
The names are sign’d, and overhead
The joy to every wandering breeze;
The blind wall rocks, and on the trees
The dead leaf trembles to the bells.
Await them. Many a merry face
Salutes them—maidens of the place,
That pelt us in the porch with flowers.
With him to whom her hand I gave.
They leave the porch, they pass the grave
That has to-day its sunny side.
For them the light of life increas’d
Who stay to share the morning feast,
Who rest to-night beside the sea.
To meet and greet a whiter sun;
My drooping memory will not shun
The foaming grape of eastern France.
And hearts are warm’d and faces bloom,
As drinking health to bride and groom
We wish them store of happy days.
Conjecture of a stiller guest,
Perchance, perchance, among the rest,
And, tho’ in silence, wishing joy.
And those white-favour’d horses wait;
They rise but linger, it is late;
Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.
From little cloudlets on the grass,
But sweeps away as out we pass
To range the woods, to roam the park.
And talk of others that are wed,
And how she look’d, and what he said,
And back we come at fall of dew.
The shade of passing thought, the wealth
Of words and wit, the double health,
The crowning cup, the three times three,
Dumb is that tower which spake so loud,
And high in heaven the streaming cloud,
And on the downs a rising fire:
Till over down and over dale
All night the shining vapour sail
And pass the silent-lighted town,
And catch at every mountain head,
And o’er the friths that branch and spread
Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills;
With tender gloom the roof, the wall;
And breaking let the splendour fall
To spangle all the happy shores
And, star and system rolling past,
A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
THE END.
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