LXVI.

WHEN in the down I sink my head,

Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath;

Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death, Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

I walk as ere I walk'd forlorn,

When all our path was fresh with dew,

And all the bugle breezes blew

Reveillée to the breaking morn.

But what is this? I turn about,

I find a trouble in thine eye

Which makes me sad I know not why,

Nor can my dream resolve the doubt :

But ere the lark hath left the lea

I wake, and I discern the truth;
It is the trouble of my youth

That foolish sleep transfers to thee.

LXVII.

I DREAM'D there would be Spring no more,
That Nature's ancient power was lost:

The streets were black with smoke and frost, They chatter'd trifles at the door.

I wander'd from the noisy town,

I found a wood with thorny boughs:

I took the thorns to bind

I wore them like a civic crown.

my brows,

I met with scoffs, I met with scorns

From youth and babe and hoary hairs:
They call'd me in the public squares

The fool that wears a crown of thorns.

They call'd me fool, they call'd me child :
I found an angel of the night:

The voice was low, the look was bright,
He look'd upon my crown and smiled:

He reach'd the glory of a hand,

That seem'd to touch it into leaf:

The voice was not the voice of grief; The words were hard to understand.

LXVIII.

I CANNOT See the features right,

When on the gloom I strive to paint

The face I know; the hues are faint And mix with hollow masks of night:

Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,

A hand that points, and palled shapes In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

And crowds that stream from yawning doors, And shoals of pucker'd faces drive;

Dark bulks that tumble half alive,

And lazy lengths on boundless shores :

Till all at once beyond the will

I hear a wizard music roll,

And thro' a lattice on the soul

Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

LXIX.

SLEEP, kinsman thou to death and trance

And madness, thou hast forged at last
A night-long Present of the Past

In which we went through summer France.

Hadst thou such credit with the soul?

So bring an opiate treble-strong,

Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong That thus my pleasure might be whole;

While now we talk as once we talk'd

Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old we walk'd

Beside the river's wooded reach,

The fortress, and the mountain ridge,

The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach.

H