He only glanced in passing,
The lad with amber eyes
Who met us high on Hareshaw
Just as we topped the rise.

We climbed the hill together,
We two, so newly one:
But down into the valley
We travelled, each alone.

Patting goodbye, his father said, “My lad,
You'll always show the Hun a brave man's face.
I'd rather you were dead than in disgrace.
We're proud to see you going, Jim, we're glad.”

His mother whimpered, “Jim, my boy, I frets
Until ye git a nice safe wound, I do.”
His sisters said: why couldn't they go too.
His brothers said they'd send him cigarettes.

For three years, once a week, they wrote the same,
Adding, “We hope you use the Y.M. Hut.”
And once a day came twenty Navy Cut.
And once an hour a bullet missed its aim.

Where the pheasant roosts at night,
Lonely, drowsy, out of sight,
Where the evening breezes sigh
Solitary, there stray I.

Close along the shaded stream,
Source of many a youthful dream,
Where branchy cedars dim the day
There I muse, and there I stray.

Yet, what can please amid this bower,
That charmed the eye for many an hour!
The budding leaf is lost to me,
And dead the bloom on every tree.

The winding stream, that glides along,
The lark, that tunes her early song,
The mountain's brow, the sloping vale,

The buzzer awakes me, and shortly I hear
The three-o'clock shift down the road come clattering;
The noise of their tackety boots ringing clear
On the frozen metal, and young lads chattering,
And whistling and singing, as they go by,
To the undimmed stars of the icy sky.

They pass the house; and I turn in my bed
To slumber again; but the tacketies clattering
Still rings in my brain, and still in my head,
The singing of youth and the whistling and chattering—
Of youth that whistles and sings for a bit
To the winter stars on the way to the pit.

These jewel-coloured walls, gemmed Salomè.
This Queen uneasy by her cankered lord,
This muffled headsman rigid as his sword
(Like a basalt Death hewn for idolatry,
Or Death itself in passive cruelty
Waiting to be recognized and adored)
Through incensed thunder-darkness long have pored
Upon thy steps, seeming to say to thee
‘Dance while thou canst, hot Salomè; life lies,
Thy slim throne-shaking feet to snakes are bare.’
Will the repellent King not cry at last
‘Involuntary stricken duliast,
What starry horror draws thine abject stare

And this, then, is love's ending. It is like
The history of some fair southern clime:
Hot fires are in the bosom of the earth,
And the warmed soil puts forth its thousand flowers,
Its fruits of gold—summer's regality;
And sleep and odours float upon the air,
Making it heavy with its own delight.
At length the subterranean element
Bursts from its secret solitude, and lays
All waste before it. The red lava stream
Sweeps like a pestilence; and that which was
A garden for some fairy tale's young queen
Is one wild desert, lost in burning sand.

If he be a nobler lover, take him!
You in you I seek, and not myself;
Love with men 's what women choose to make him,
Seraph strong to soar, or fawn-eyed elf:
All I am or can, your beauty gave it,
Lifting me a moment nigh to you,
And my bit of heaven, I fain would save it—
Mine I thought it was, I never knew.

What you take of me is yours to serve you,
All I give, you gave to me before;
Let him win you! If I but deserve you,
I keep all you grant to him and more:
You shall make me dare what others dare not,

What hath Love with Thought to do?
Still at variance are the two.
Love is sudden, Love is rash,
Love is like the levin flash,
Comes as swift, as swiftly goes,
And his mark as surely knows.

Thought is lumpish, Thought is slow,
Weighing long 'tween yes and no;
When dear Love is dead and gone,
Thought comes creeping in anon,
And, in his deserted nest,
Sits to hold the crowner's quest.

Since we love, what need to think?
Happiness stands on a brink
Whence too easy 't is to fall
Whither 's no return at all;
Have a care, half-hearted lover,

Lo I, the man who from the Muse did ask
Her deepest notes to swell the Patriot's meeds,
Am now enforced, a far unfitter task,
For cap and gown to leave my minstrel weeds;
For yon dull tone, that tinkles on the air,
Bids me lay by the lyre and go to morning prayer.

O how I hate the sound! it is the knell
That still a requiem tolls to Comfort's hour;
And loath am I, at Superstition's bell,
To quit or Morpheus' or the Muse's bower:
Better to lie and doze, than gape amain,
Hearing still mumbled o'er the same eternal strain.

Deep sighed the wind, slow struck the hour,
When from his Couch Alphonso rose;
Soft Down invoked Sleep's soothing power,
No pillow there could give repose!

The night still brooded on the hill,
Beneath, the sable river rolled,
Not glittering now the tinkling rill,
Its stream was dark, its spirit cold.

His chamber long, with restless feet,
The Lord Alphonso traversed o'er;
There once refreshed by slumbers sweet,
But slumbers sweet he knows no more!

His roused Domestics strait obey
The signal of the Lord they hate;