And now from all at once my leave I take
With this petition, that when thou shalt wake,
My tears already spent may serve for thine,
And all thy sorrows be excus'd by mine!
Yea, rather than my loss should draw on hers,
(Hear, Heaven, the suit which my sad soul prefers!)
Let this her slumber, like Oblivion's stream,
Make her believe our love was but a dream!
Let me be dead in her as to the earth,
Ere Nature lose the grace of such a birth.
Sleep thou, sweet soul, from all disquiet free,
And since I now beguile thy destiny,

Thus came she to the place (where aged men,
Maidens and wives, and youth and children
That had but newly learnt their mother's name,
Had almost spent their tears before she came,)
And those her earnest and related words
Threw from her breast; and unto them affords
These as the means to further her pretence:
Receive not on your souls, by innocence
Wrong'd, lasting stains which from a sluice the sea
May still wash o'er, but never wash away.
Turn all your wraths on me: for here behold
The hand that tore your sacred tree of gold;

O that thou wert no actor in this play,
My sweetest Cælia! or divorc'd away
From me in this: O Nature! I confess
I cannot look upon her heaviness
Without betraying that infirmity
Which at my birth thy hand bestow'd on me.
Would I had died when I receiv'd my birth!
Or known the grave before I knew the earth!
Heavens! I but one life did receive from you,
And must so short a loan be paid with two?
Cannot I die but like that brutish stem
Which have their best belov'd to die with them?
O let her live! some bless'd power hear my cry!

When I'm on a long, long “bye,”
'Neath a foreign rooftree resting,
Thoughts like swallows homeward fly
To the niche where you are nesting.

Then I wish I worked in sounds—
Words at best have limitations:
Music sets no metes and bounds
To the heart's communications.

Music's language could I reach,
I should write some pensive measures
Telling what our English speech
Cannot tell, for all its treasures.

Solemnly the Senior Class
Moves the aisle adown.
Stand up, Bab! Watch sister pass
In her cap and gown!

Once she was as small as you,
With as much to know.
I wrote ballads for her, too—
Long, oh, long ago.

She was once, like you, a fay,
Come with us to dwell,
But she vanished quite one day;
Whither—who can tell?

Some day you will take your flight
From the elfin bough:
Ah, if I could hold you tight,
As I hold you now!

But you'll dance away from me,
Faery aisles adown;
And, grown up, a Senior be,
In a cap and gown.

She told her love, and her sorrow woke
With a pang renewed at each word she spoke.
But Yusuf looked not upon her: in dread
He lowered his eyes and he bent his head.
As he looked on the ground in a whirl of thought
He saw his own form on the carpet wrought,
Where a bed was figured of silk and brocade,
And himself by the side of Zulaikha laid.
From the pictured carpet he looked in quest
Of a spot where his eye might, untroubled, rest.
He looked on the wall, on the door; the pair
Of rose-lipped lovers was painted there.

May has come in—young May, the beautiful—
Wearing the sweetest chaplet of the year.
Along the eastern corridors she walks,
What time the clover rocks the earliest bee,
Her feet a-flush with sunrise, and her veil
Floating in breezy odours o'er her hair;
And ample garments, fluttering at the hem,
With pleasing rustle round her sandal shoon.
What happy voices wake the rural airs,
From hillside homes and valley cottages.
And every village is alive at dawn!
Long ere the dews have winged themselves to heaven,
In vernal paths the little bands are out,

The spring departs; and, in her speeding haste,
Chased by a swarm of murmuring winds and bees.
Scatters the withered lilacs as she flies.
The blue bird mourns for her; the russet wren
Leads out its young, to see her ere she leaves.
Her hands are full of garlands, some a-bloom,
Some budding and some dead. With floating hair,
Thus fled Ophelia in her frenzied hour;
And, like Ophelia, from her willow branch,
Spring, singing, falls into the lilied pool,
And in the crystal stream of summer drowns.
The heavens a little weep above her form,

But this is past, and dies the cloudless day.
How solemnly and calm the evening falls
Around the rural scene! One burning bar
Along the shadowy western hill-top flames,
And, like the blazing iron upon an anvil,
Sinks to a cooler red, and darkly fades,
Leaving the vale to twilight. Charmed hour!
Now fall the dews, of which the blossoms drink
Deep opiate draughts, till, nodding on their stems,
Within their scented mantles folded close,
They dream till morn. The sounds of day are done
Innumerous tongues, which only wake at eve,

Let us descend afar the summer road,
And note how in the crowded mart is kept
The sacred day. Along the harvest fields.
Throughout the stretching valley, smokes the air
With a long line of the impending dust,
Sultry and thick, until the Sunday garb
Of smoothest black becomes a suit of grey,
And the deep standing grain beside the road
Bows low with the collecting weight; while feet
Innumerous are plumping in the dust,
Deep as the fetlocks, as it were a snow;
And flying wheels fling from their tires and spokes
Invisible the choking cloud. Behold the inn,