'Tis a strange mystery, the power of words!
Life is in them, and death. A word can send
The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek.
Hurrying with many meanings; or can turn
The current cold and deadly to the heart.
Anger and fear are in them; grief and joy
Are on their sound; yet slight, impalpable:--
A word is but a breath of passing air.
Not human art, but living gods alone
Can fashion beauties that by changing live,--
Her buds to spring, his fruits to autumn give,
To earth her fountains in her heart of stone;
But these in their begetting are o'erthrown,
Nor may the sentenced minutes find reprieve;
And summer in the blush of joy must grieve
To shed his flaunting crown of petals blown.
We to our works may not impart our breath,
Nor them with shifting light of life array;
We show but what one happy moment saith;
Who can live in heart so glad
As the merry country lad?
Who upon a fair green balk
May at pleasure sit and walk,
And amid the azure skies
See the morning sun arise;
While he hears in every spring
How the birds do chirp and sing;
Or before the hounds in cry
See the hare go stealing by;
Or along the shallow brook
Angling with a baited hook,
See the fishes leap and play
In a blessed sunny day;
Or to hear the partridge call
The portrait there above my bed
They tell me is a work of art;
My Wife,--since twenty years she's dead:
Her going nearly broke my heart.
Alas! No little ones we had
To light our hearth with joy and glee;
Yet as I linger lone and sad
I know she's waiting me.
The picture? Sargent painted it,
And it has starred in many a show.
Her eyes are on me where I sit,
And follow me where'er I go.
She'll smile like that when I am gone,
And I am frail and oh so ill!
Aye, when I'm waxen, cold and wan,
HOW many summers, love,
Have I been thine?
How many days, thou dove,
Hast thou been mine?
Time, like the winged wind
When ’t bends the flowers,
Hath left no mark behind,
To count the hours.
Some weight of thought, though loth,
On thee he leaves;
Some lines of care round both
Perhaps he weaves;
Some fears,—a soft regret
For joys scarce known;
Sweet looks we half forget;—
All else is flown!
Ah!—With what thankless heart
Here where the end of bone is no end of song
And the earth is bedecked with immortality
In what was poetry
And now is pride beside
And nationality,
Here is a battle with no bravery
But if the coward's tongue has gone
Swording his own lusty lung.
Listen if there is victory
Written into a library
Waving the books in banners
Soldierly at last, for the lines
Go marching on, delivered of the soul.
And happily may they rest beyond
Suspicion now, the incomprehensibles
Traitorous in such talking
Play on thy mother's bosom, babe, for in that holy isle
The error cannot find thee yet, the grieving, nor the guile;
Held in thy mother's arms above life's dark and troubled wave,
Thou lookest with thy fearless smile upon the floating grave.
Play, loveliest innocence!--Thee yet Arcadia circles round,
A charmed power for thee has set the lists of fairy ground;
Each gleesome impulse Nature now can sanction and befriend,
Nor to that willing heart as yet the duty and the end.
It was the silver, heart-enveloping view
Of the mysterious sea-line far away,
Seen only on a gleaming gold-white day,
That made it dear and beautiful to you.
And Laura loved it for the little hill,
Where the quartz sparkled fire, barren and dun,
Whence in the shadow of the dying sun,
She contemplated Hallow's wooden mill.
While Danny liked the sheltering high grass,
In which he lay upon a clear dry night,
To hear and see, screened skilfully from sight,
The happy lovers of the valley pass.
A Female Friend advis'd a Swain
(Whose Heart she wish'd at ease)
Make Love thy Pleasure, not thy Pain,
Nor let it deeply seize.
Beauty, where Vanities abound,
No serious Passion claims;
Then, 'till a Phoenix can be found,
Do not admit the Flames.
But griev'd She finds, that his Replies
(Since prepossess'd when Young)
Take all their Hints from Silvia's Eyes,
None from ARDELIA's Tongue.
Thus, Cupid, of our Aim we miss,
Who wou'd unbend thy Bow;
Hast thou the infant seen that yet, unknowing of the love
Which warms and cradles, calmly sleeps the mother's heart above--
Wandering from arm to arm, until the call of passion wakes,
And glimmering on the conscious eye--the world in glory breaks?
And hast thou seen the mother there her anxious vigil keep?
Buying with love that never sleeps the darling's happy sleep?
With her own life she fans and feeds that weak life's trembling rays,
And with the sweetness of the care, the care itself repays.
