joy

High in the breathless Hall the Minstrel sate,
And Emont's murmur mingled with the Song.--
The words of ancient time I thus translate,
A festal strain that hath been silent long:--
"From town to town, from tower to tower,
The red rose is a gladsome flower.
Her thirty years of winter past,
The red rose is revived at last;
She lifts her head for endless spring,
For everlasting blossoming:
Both roses flourish, red and white:
In love and sisterly delight
The two that were at strife are blended,

Love is enough: have no thought for to-morrow
If ye lie down this even in rest from your pain,
Ye who have paid for your bliss with great sorrow:
For as it was once so it shall be again.
Ye shall cry out for death as ye stretch forth in vain

Feeble hands to the hands that would help but they may not,
Cry out to deaf ears that would hear if they could;
Till again shall the change come, and words your lips say not
Your hearts make all plain in the best wise they would
And the world ye thought waning is glorious and good:

Why flatter thyself, Tyrant,
In ways great in evil?
The Lord's goodness ceases not
Keeping watch on the pious.

Keener yet than the keenest
Blade, thy tongue watches
To generate wild untruth
And plot slander' gainst the good.

Evil's thy love, not sacred virtues;
A lier's thy love, not a truthsayer;
Thine own accursed eye in joy
Gazes at treason most infectious.

For this the Lord God shall fling
Thee from the midst of His people;
Grinding thee to dust, aye, thy home

There is a land where summer skies
Are gleaming with a thousand dyes
Blending in witching harmonies,
in harmonies;
and grassy knoll and forest height,
are flushing in the rosy light,
And all above is azure bright -
Australia, Australia, Australia.


There is a land where honey flows
Where laughing corn luxuriant grows;
Land of the myrtle and the rose,
land of the rose.
On hill and plain the clustering vine
Is gushing out with purple wine,
And cups are quaffed to thee and thine -

Fair stream of the mountain, brightly flowing
Between thy fresh margins, gay with flowers,
Life's uncertain visions showing;
Thus, like thy waters glide past the hours.
Oft on thy sunny banks I lie
And mark the waves that glitter by
With fleeting joy and brightness glowing.

Fair stream! when no more near thee reclining,
I gaze and lament for moments gone—
Cold and silent, past repining—
Still thy clear way thou wilt murmur on:
Still will thy roses bloom anew,

'The play's the thing!'-- Hamlet.

Tavistock Hotel, Nov. 1839.
Dear Charles,
-- In reply to your letter, and Fanny's,
Lord Brougham, it appears, isn't dead,-- though Queen Anne is;
'Twas a 'plot' and a 'farce'-- you hate farces, you say --
Take another 'plot,' then, viz. the plot of a Play.

The Countess of Arundel, high in degree,
As a lady possess'd of an earldom in fee,
Was imprudent enough at fifteen years of age,
A period of life when we're not over sage,

329

So glad we are—a Stranger'd deem
'Twas sorry, that we were—
For where the Holiday should be
There publishes a Tear—
Nor how Ourselves be justified—
Since Grief and Joy are done
So similar—An Optizan
Could not decide between—

Sometimes I wonder if you guess
The deep impassioned tenderness
Which overflows my heart;
The love I never dare confess;
Yet hard, yea, harder to repress
Than tears too fain to start.

Sometimes I ponder, O my sweet,
The things I'll tell you when we meet;
But straightway at your sight
My heart's blood oozes to my feet
Like thawing waters in the heat,
Confused with too much light.

I hardly know, when you are near,
If it is love, or joy, or fear
Which fills my languid frame;

It is something in this darker dream demented
   to have wrestled with its pleasure and its pain:
it is something to have sinned, and have repented:
   it is something to have failed, and tried again!

It is something to have loved the brightest Beauty
   with no hope of aught but silence for your vow:
it is something to have tried to do your duty:
   it is something to be trying, trying now!

And, in the silent solemn hours,
   when your soul floats down the far faint flood of time --

So sweet love seemed that April morn,
When first we kissed beside the thorn,
So strangely sweet, it was not strange
We thought that love could never change.

But I can tell--let truth be told--
That love will change in growing old;
Though day by day is naught to see,
So delicate his motions be.

And in the end 'twill come to pass
Quite to forget what once he was,
Nor even in fancy to recall
The pleasure that was all in all.

His little spring, that sweet we found,