Her house looked cold from the foggy lea,
And the square of each window a dull black blur
Where showed no stir:
Yes, her gloom within at the lack of me
Seemed matching mine at the lack of her.

The black squares grew to be squares of light
As the eyeshade swathed the house and lawn,
And viols gave tone;
There was glee within. And I found that night
The gloom of severance mine alone.

KINGSTON-MAURWARD PARK.

The yesterday doth never smile,
The day goes drudging through the while,
Yet, in the name of Godhead, I
The morrow front, and can defy;
Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,
Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ah me! it was my childhood's thought,
If He should make my web a blot
On life's fair picture of delight,
My heart's content would find it right.
But O, these waves and leaves,--
When happy stoic Nature grieves,
No human speech so beautiful
As their murmurs mine to lull.
On this altar God hath built
I lay my vanity and guilt;
Nor me can Hope or Passion urge
Hearing as now the lofty dirge
Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,
Nature's funeral high and dim,--
Sable pageantry of clouds,
Mourning summer laid in shrouds.
Many...

Winter on the mountains
Summer on the shore,
The robes of sun-gleams woven,
The lake's blue wavelets wore.

Cold, white, against the heavens,
Flashed winter's crown of snow,
And the blossoms of the spring-tide
Waved brightly far below.

The mountain's head was dreary,
The cold and cloud were there,
But the mountain's feet were sandaled
With flowers of beauty rare.

And winding thro' the mountains
The lake's calm wavelets rolled,
And a cloudless sun was gilding
Their ripples with its gold.

Adown the lake we glided
Thro' all the sunlit day;
The cold snows gleamed above us,
But fair flowers fringed our way

The snows crept down the mountain,
The flowers crept up the slope,
Till they seemed to meet and mingle...

Of all the blessings which my life has known,
I value most, and most praise God for three:
Want, Loneliness, and Pain, those comrades true,

Who masqueraded in the garb of foes
For many a year, and filled my heart with dread.
Yet fickle joys, like false, pretentious friends,
Have proved less worthy than this trio.    First,

Want taught me labour, led me up the steep
And toilsome paths to hills of pure delight,
Trod only by the feet that know fatigue,
And yet press on until the heights appear.

Then loneliness and hunger of the heart
Sent me upreaching to the realms of space,
Till all the silences grew eloquent,
And all their loving forces hailed me friend.

Last, pain taught prayer! placed in my hand the staff
Of close communion with the o...

Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.

Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away!
Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood:
Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.

Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.

The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head:
The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy feet:
But thy soul or this...

But that from slow dissolving pomps of dawn
No verity of slowly strengthening light
Early or late hath issued; that the day
Scarce-shown, relapses rather, self-withdrawn,
Back to the glooms of ante-natal night,
For this, O human beings, mourn we may.

I am waiting in the desert, looking out towards the sunset,
And counting every moment till we meet.
I am waiting by the marshes and I tremble and I listen
Till the soft sands thrill beneath your coming feet.

Till I see you, tall and slender, standing clear against the skyline
A graceful shade across the lingering red,
While your hair the breezes ruffle, turns to silver in the twilight,
And makes a fair faint aureole round your head.

Far away towards the sunset I can see a narrow river,
That unwinds itself in red tranquillity;
I can hear its rippled meeting, and the gurgle of its greeting,
As it mingles with the loved and long sought sea.

In the purple sky above me showing dark against the starlight,
Long wavering flights of homeward birds fly low,
They...

Rest, rest - there is no rest,
Until the quiet grave
Comes with its narrow arch
The heart to save
From life's long cankering rust,
From torpor, cold and still -
The loveless, saddened dust,
The jaded will.

And yet, be far the hour
Whose haven calls me home;
Long be the arduous day
Till evening come;
What sureness now remains
But that through livelong strife
Only the loser gains
An end to life?

Then in the soundless deep
Of even the shallowest grave
Childhood and love he'll keep,
And his soul save;
All vext desire, all vain
Cries of a conflict done
Fallen to rest again;
Death's refuge won.

You are here, and you are wanted,
    Though a waif upon life's stair;
Though the sunlit hours are haunted
    With the shadowy shapes of care.
Still the Great One, the All-Seeing
Called your spirit into being -
Gave you strength for any fate.
Since your life by Him was needed,
All your ways by Him are heeded -
    You can trust and you can wait.

You can wait to know the meaning
    Of the troubles sent your soul;
Of the chasms intervening
    'Twixt your purpose and your goal;
Of the sorrows and the trials,
Of the silence and denials,
    Ofttimes answering to your pleas;
Of the stinted sweets of pleasure,
And of pain's too generous measure -
    You can wait the WHY of these.

Forth from planet unto planet,
    You have go...

DRINK, oh youth, joy's purest ray
From thy loved one's eyes all day,

And her image paint at night!
Better rule no lover knows,
Yet true rapture greater grows,

When far sever'd from her sight.

Powers eternal, distance, time,
Like the might of stars sublime,

Gently rock the blood to rest,
O'er my senses softness steals,
Yet my bosom lighter feels,

And I daily am more blest.

Though I can forget her ne'er,
Yet my mind is free from care,

I can calmly live and move;
Unperceived infatuation
Longing turns to adoration,

Turns to reverence my love.

Ne'er can cloud, however light,
Float in ether's regions bright,

When drawn upwards by the sun,
As my heart in rapturous calm.
Free fro...

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life's end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bonc,
Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man's eagle mind.

My Horse's feet beside the lake,
Where sweet the unbroken moonbeams lay,
Sent echoes through the night to wake,
Each glistening strand, each heath-fringed bay.

The poplar avenue was pass’d,
And the roofed bridge that spans the stream,
Up the steep street I hurried fast,
Led by thy taper’s starlike beam.

I came! I saw thee rise:, the blood
Poured flushing to thy languid cheek.
Locked in each other’s arms we stood,
In tears, with hearts too full to speak.

Days flew; ah, soon I could discern
A trouble in thine altered air.
Thy hand lay languidly in mine,
Thy cheek was grave, thy speech grew rare.

I blame thee not:, This heart, I know,
To be long lov’d was never fram’d,
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too r...

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had,
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends,
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose,
O there's a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

They are ashamed who leave so soon
The Inn of Grief--who thought to stay
Through many a faithful sun and moon,
Yet tarry but a day.

Shame-faced I watch them pay the score,
Then straight with eager footsteps press
Where waits beyond its rose-wreathed door
The Inn of Happiness.

I wish I did not know that here,
Here too--where they have dreamed to stay
So many and many a golden year
They lodge but for a day.

I sit by the fire in the gloaming,
    In the depths of my easy chair,
And I ponder, as old men ponder,
    Over times and things that were.

And outside is the gusty rushing,
    Of the fierce November blast,
With the snow drift waltzing and whirling,
    And eddying swiftly past,

It's a wild night to be abroad in,
    When the ice blast and snow drift meet
To wreath round all the world of winter
    A shroud and a winding sheet.

There's a dash of hail at the window,
    Thick with driving snow is the air;
But I sit here in ease and comfort
    In the depths of my easy chair.

I have fought my way in life's battle,
    And won Fortune's fickle caress;
Won from fame just a passing notice,
    And enjoy what is called succes...

'Tis my twentieth year: dim, now, youth stretches behind me;
Breaking fresh at my feet, lies, like an ocean, the world.
And despised seem, now, those quiet fields I have travell'd:
Eager to thee I turn, Life, and thy visions of joy.
Fame I see, with her wreath, far off approaching to crown me;
Love, whose starry eyes fever my heart with desire:
And impassion'd I yearn for the future, all unconscious,
Ah, poor dreamer! what ills life in its circle enfolds.
Not more restless the boy, whose eager, confident bosom
The wide, unknown sea fills with a hunger to roam.
Often beside the surge of the desolate ocean he paces;
Ingrate, dreams of a sky brighter, serener than his.
Passionate soul! light holds he a mother's tearful entreaties,
Lightly leaves he behind all the sad faces of h...

I.
Is it you, that preach’d in the chapel there looking over the sand?
Follow’d us too that night, and dogg’d us, and drew me to land?

II.
What did I feel that night? You are curious. How should I tell?
Does it matter so much what I felt? You rescued me—yet—was it well
That you came unwish’d for, uncall’d, between me and the deep and my doom,
Three days since, three more dark days of the Godless gloom
Of a life without sun, without health, with out hope, without any delight
In anything here upon earth? but ah God, that night, that night
When the rolling eyes of the lighthouse there on the fatal neck
Of land running out into rock—they had saved many hundreds from wreck—
Glared on our way toward death, I remember I thought, as we past,
Does it matter how many they saved?...

    Regret not me;
    Beneath the sunny tree
I lie uncaring, slumbering peacefully.

    Swift as the light
    I flew my faery flight;
Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

    I did not know
    That heydays fade and go,
But deemed that what was would be always so.

    I skipped at morn
    Between the yellowing corn,
Thinking it good and glorious to be born.

    I ran at eves
    Among the piled-up sheaves,
Dreaming, "I grieve not, therefore nothing grieves."

    Now soon will come
    The apple, pear, and plum
And hinds will sing, and autumn insects hum.

    Again you will fare
    To cider-makings rare,
And junketings; but I shall not be there.

    Yet gaily sing
    Until the pe...