EPICEDE.

(James Lorimer Graham died at Florence, April 30, 1876.)

LIFE may give for love to death

Little; what are life's gifts worth

To the dead wrapt round with earth?

Yet from lips of living breath

Sighs or words we are fain to give,

All that yet, while yet we live,

Life may give for love to death.

Dead so long before his day,

Passed out of the Italian sun
To the dark where all is done,

Fallen upon the verge of May,

Here at life's and April's end

How should song salute my friend

Dead so long before his day?

Not a kindlier life or sweeter

Time, that lights and quenches men,

Now may quench or light again,

Mingling with the mystic metre

Woven of all men's lives with his

Not a clearer note than this,

Not a kindlier life or sweeter.

In this heavenliest part of earth
He that living loved the light,

Light and song, may rest aright,

One in death, if strange in birth,

With the deathless dead that make

Life the lovelier for their sake

In this heavenliest part of earth.

Light, and song, and sleep at last

Struggling hands and suppliant knees

Get no goodlier gift than these.

Song that holds remembrance fast,

Light that lightens death, attend

Round their graves who have to friend

Light, and song, and sleep at last.

TO VICTOR HUGO.

He had no children, who for love of men,

Being God, endured of Gods such things as thou,

Father; nor on his thunder-beaten brow

Fell such a woe as bows thine head again,

Twice bowed before, though godlike, in man's ken,

And seen too high for any stroke to bow

Save this of some strange God's that bends it now The third time with such weight as bruised it then. Fain would grief speak, fain utter for love's sake Some word; but comfort who might bid thee take? What God in your own tongue shall talk with thee, Showing how all souls that look upon the sun

Shall be for thee one spirit and thy son,

And thy soul's child the soul of man to be?

January 3, 1876.

INFERIAE.

SPRING, and the light and sound of things on earth.

Requickening, all within our green sea's girth ;
A time of passage or a time of birth

Fourscore years since as this year, first and last.

The sun is all about the world we see,

The breath and strength of very spring; and we
Live, love, and feed on our own hearts; but he
Whose heart fed mine has passed into the past.

Past, all things born with sense and blood and breath; The flesh hears nought that now the spirit saith.

If death be like as birth and birth as death,

The first was fair-more fair should be the last.