AND therefore, if to love can be desert,
As these you see, and trembling knees that fail
To bear the burden of a heavy heart,
This weary minstrel-life that once was girt
To climb Aornus, and can scarce avail
To pipe now 'gainst the woodland nightingale
A melancholy music?- why advert
To these things? O beloved, it is plain
I am not of thy worth nor for thy place;
And yet because I love thee, I obtain
From that same love this vindicating grace,
To live on still in love and yet in vain ;
To bless thee, yet renounce thee to thy face.
INDEED this very love which is my boast,
And which, when rising up from breast to brow,
Doth crown me with a ruby large enow
To draw men's eyes, and prove the inner cost, —
This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,
I should not love withal, unless that thou
Hadst set me an example, shown me how,
When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed,
And love called love. And thus, I cannot speak
Of love even, as a good thing of my own.
Thy soul hath snatched up mine, all faint and weak,
And placed it by thee on a golden throne;
And that I love (O soul, I must be meek!),
Is by thee only, whom I love alone.
AND wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough
Between our faces, to cast light on each?
I drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach
My hand to hold thy spirit so far off
From myself - me -that I should bring thee proof,
In words, of love hid in me out of reach.
Nay, let the silence of my womanhood
Commend my woman-love to thy belief, -
Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,
And rend the garment of my life, in brief,
By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,
Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.
SWEET Mavis ! at this cool delicious hour
Of gloaming, when a pensive quietness
Hushes the odorous air, with what a power
Of impulse unsubdued, thou dost express
Thyself a spirit! While the silver dew
Holy as manna on the meadow falls,
Thy song's impassioned clarity, trembling through
This omnipresent stillness, disenthralls
The soul to adoration. First I heard
A low, thick, lubric gurgle, soft as love, Yet sad as memory, through the silence poured Like starlight. But the mood intenser grows, Precipitate rapture quickens, move on move Lucidly linked together, till the close.
O DEEP unlovely brooklet, moaning slow
Through moorish fen in utter loneliness!
The partridge cowers beside thy loamy flow
In pulseful tremor, when with sudden press
The huntsman fluskers through the rustled heather.
In March thy sallow buds from vermeil shells
Break satin-tinted, downy as the feather
Of moss-chat that among the purplish bells
Breasts into fresh new life her three unborn.
The plover hovers o'er thee, uttering clear And mournful-strange his human cry forlorn. While wearily, alone, and void of cheer Thou guid'st thy nameless waters from the fen, To sleep unsunned in an untrampled glen.
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