HE tasted love with half his mind,
Nor ever drank the inviolate spring
Where highest heaven, who first
could fling

This bitter seed among mankind;
That could the dead, whose dying eyes
Were closed with wail, resume their
life,

They would but find in child and wife

An iron welcome when they rise: 'Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine,

To pledge them with a kindly tear, To talk them o'er, to wish them here, To count their memories half divine;

But if they came who past away.

Behold their brides in other hands; The hard heir strides about their lands,

And will not yield them for a day. Yea, tho' their sons were none of these,

Not less the yet-loved sire would

XCI.

WHEN rosy plumelets tuft the larch, And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;

Or underneath the barren bush Flits by the sea blue bird of March; Come, wear the form by which I know Thy spirit in time among thy peers, The hope of unaccomplish'd years Be large and lucid round thy brow. When summer's hourly-mellowing change

May breathe, with many roses sweet, Upon the thousand waves of wheat, That ripple round the lonely grange; Come not in watches of the night, But when the sunbeam broodeth warm,

Come, beauteous in thine after form, And like a finer light in light.

XCII.

1F any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain :
Yea, tho' it spake and made appeal
To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.
Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And tho' the months, revolving near,
Should prove the phantom-warning
true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments,
And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.

XCIII.

I SHALL not see thee. Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land,
Where first he walk'd when clasp'd in
clay?

No visual shade of some one lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may

come

Where all the nerve of sense is

numb:

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.
O, therefore, from thy sightless range
With gods in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change,
Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to
name;

That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

XCIV.

How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold

Should be the man whose thought would hold

An hour's communion with the dead. In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day, Except, like them, thou too canst say,

My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast, Imaginations calm and fair,

The memory like a cloudless air, The conscience as a sea at rest: But when the heart is full of din, And doubt beside the portal waits, They can but listen at the gates, And hear the household jar within.

XCV.

By night we linger'd on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o'er the

sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn ;
And calm that let the tapers burn

Unwavering: not a cricket chirr'd: The brook alone far-off was heard, And on the board the fluttering urn: And bats went round in fragrant skies, And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes

And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;

While now we sang old songs that peal'd

From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease,

The white kine glimmer'd, and the

trees

Laid their dark arms about the field.

But when those others, one by one, Withdrew themselves from me and night,

And in the house light after light Went out, and I was all alone, A hunger seized my heart; I read Of that glad year which once had been,

In those fall'n leaves which kept
their green,

The noble letters of the dead:
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and
strange

Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke The faith, the vigor, bold to dwell

On doubts that drive the coward back,

And keen thro' wordy snares to track Suggestion to her inmost cell. So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch'd me from the past,

And all at once it seem'd at last His living soul was flash'd on mine,

Laid their dark arms about the field:
And suck'd from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and
swung

The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said

"The dawn, the dawn," and died away;

And East and West, without a breath,

Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,

To broaden into boundless day.

XCVI.

You say, but with no touch of scorn, Sweet-hearted, you, whose light blue eyes

Are tender over drowning flies, You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. I know not: one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed, Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first, But ever strove to make it true: Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,

He would not make his judgment blind,

He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at

length

To find a stronger faith his own;

And power was with him in the night,

eye,

Their hearts of old have beat in tune,

Their meetings made December
June,

Their every parting was to die.
Their love has never past away;

The days she never can forget
Are earnest that he loves her yet,
Whate'er the faithless people say.
Her life is lone, he sits apart,

He loves her yet, she will not weep, Tho'rapt in matters dark and deep He seems to slight her simple heart. He thrids the labyrinth of the mind, He reads the secret of the star, He seems so near and yet so far, He looks so cold: she thinks him kind. She keeps the gift of years before,

A wither'd violet is her bliss: She knows not what his greatness is: For that, for all, she loves him more. For him she plays, to him she sings; Of early faith and plighted yows; She knows but matters of the house, And he, he knows a thousand things. Her faith is fixt and cannot move,

She darkly feels him great and wise, She dwells on him with faithful eyes,

"I cannot understand; I love."

XCVIII.

You leave us you will see the Rhine,
And those fair hills I sail'd below,
When I was there with him; and go
By summer belts of wheat and vine
To where he breathed his latest breath
That City. All her splendor seems
No livelier than the wisp that gleams
On Lethe in the eyes of Death.
Let her great Danube rolling fair
Enwind her isles, unmark'd of me:
I have not seen. I will not see
Vienna; rather dream that there,

A treble darkness, Evil haunts The birth, the bridal; friend from friend

Is oftener parted, fathers bend Above more graves, a thousand wants Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey By each cold hearth, and sadness Hlings

Her shadow on the blaze of kings: And yet myself have heard him say, That not in any mother town

With statelier progress to and fro The double tides of chariots flow By park and suburb under brown Of lustier leaves; no more content, He told me, lives in any crowd, When all is gay with lamps, and loud With sport and song, in booth and tent,

Imperial halls, or open plain;

And wheels the circled dance, and

breaks

The rocket molten into flakes Of crimson or in emerald rain.

XCIX.

RISEST thou thus, dim dawn, again,
So loud with voices of the birds,
So thick with lowing of the herds,
Day, when I lost the flower of men;
Who tremblest thro' thy darkling red

On yon swoll'n brook that bubbles fast

By meadows breathing of the past, And woodlands holy to the dead;

Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves
A song that slights the coming care,
And Autumn laying here and there
A fiery finger on the leaves;

Who wakenest with thy balmy breath
To myriads on the genial earth,
Memories of bridal, or, of birth,
And unto myriads more, of death.
O wheresoever those may be,

Betwixt the slumber of the poles,
To-day they count as kindred souls;
They know me not, but mourn with

me.

C.

I CLIMB the hill; from end to end
Of all the landscape underneath,
I find no place that does not breathe
Some gracious memory of my friend;
No gray old grange, or lonely fold,

Or low morass and whispering reed, Or simple stile from mead to mead, Or sheepwalk up the windy wold; Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw

That hears the latest linnet trill, Nor quarry trench'd along the hill, And haunted by the wrangling daw; Nor runlet tinkling from the rock; Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves