ΤΟ

The mattonest singing birds,
HE bowers whereat, in dreams, I see

Are lips and all thy melody
Of lip-begotten words;

Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined,

Then desolately fall,
O God! on my funereal mind

Like starlight on a pall;

Thy heart

thy heart! I wake and sigh,

And sleep to dream till day

Of the truth that gold can never buy
Of the bawbles that it may.

'A DREAM

visions of the dark night

I have dreamed of joy departed, But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream, that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, through storm and night,

So trembled from afar,

What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star?

R

ROMANCE

OMANCE, who loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and folded wing Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet

Hath been

a most familiar bird
Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild-wood I did lie,
A child with a most knowing eye.

Of late, eternal condor years
So shake the very heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky;
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings,
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away - forbidden things—
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.

D

FAIRY-LAND

IM vales, and shadowy floods,
And cloudy-looking woods,

Whose forms we can't discover
For the tears that drip all over!
Huge moons there wax and wane,

Every moment of the night,
Forever changing places,

And they put out the starlight

With the breath from their pale faces.

About twelve by the moon-dial,

One, more filmy than the rest

While its wide circumference

In easy drapery falls

Over hamlets, over halls,

Wherever they may be;

O'er the strange woods, o'er the sea,

Over spirits on the wing,

Over every drowsy thing,
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light;
And then, how deep, oh, deep,
Is the passion of their sleep!

In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies

With the tempests as they toss,
Like almost anything-
Or a yellow albatross.

They use that moon no more
For the same end as before,
Videlicet, a tent, —

Which I think extravagant.
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!),
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.