Over the meadows that blossom and wither

Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song ; Only the sun and the rain come hither

All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels

One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.

Only the wind here hovers and revels

In a round where life seems barren as death.

Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,

Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping

Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, 'Look thither,'

Did he whisper?

'Look forth from the flowers to the

sea;

For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms

wither,

And men that love lightly may die—but we?'

And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,

And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,

In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,

Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end- but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,

As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.

Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?

What love was ever as deep as a grave?

They are loveless now as the grass above them

Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,

Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.

Not a breath of the time that has been hovers

In the air now soft with a summer to be.

Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter We shall sleep.

Here death may deal not again for ever;

Here change may come not till all change end.

From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be ;

Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,

Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,

Here now in his triumph where all things falter,

Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,

Death lies dead.

RELICS.

THIS flower that smells of honey and the sea,

White laurustine, seems in my hand to be
A white star made of memory long ago
Lit in the heaven of dear times dead to me.

A star out of the skies love used to know

Here held in hand, a stray left yet to show

What flowers my heart was full of in the days That are long since gone down dead memory's flow.

Dead memory that revives on doubtful ways,

Half hearkening what the buried season says
Out of the world of the unapparent dead

Where the lost Aprils are, and the lost Mays.

Flower, once I knew thy star-white brethren bred

Nigh where the last of all the land made head

Against the sea, a keen-faced promontory, Flowers on salt wind and sprinkled sea-dews fed.

Their hearts were glad of the free place's glory; The wind that sang them all his stormy story Had talked all winter to the sleepless spray, And as the sea's their hues were hard and hoary.

Like things born of the sea and the bright day,

They laughed out at the years that could not slay, Live sons and joyous of unquiet hours,

And stronger than all storms that range for prey.

And in the close indomitable flowers

A keen-edged odour of the sun and showers
Was as the smell of the fresh honeycomb

Made sweet for mouths of none but paramours.

D