Accept, loved Nymph, this tribute due
To tender friendship, love, and you:
But with it take what breathed the whole.
O take to thine the poet's soul.
If Fancy here her power displays,
And if a heart exalts these lays-
You, fairest, in that fancy shine,
And all that heart is fondly thine.

Who can the hardest Task refuse,
When lovely Lady Betty sues?
If her Requests Resistance find,
It must be from the Deaf and Blind.

O nightingale, best poet of the grove,
That plaintive strain can ne'er belong to thee,
Blessed in the full possession of thy love:
O lend that strain, sweet Nighingale, to me!

'Tis mine, alas! to mourn a wretched fate:
I love a maid who all my bosom charms,
Yet lose my days without this lovely mate;
Inhuman fortune keeps her from my arms.

You happy birds! by nature's simple laws
Lead your soft lives, sustained by nature's fare;
You dwell wherever roving fancy draws,
And love and song is all your pleasing care:

I -- am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I -- am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to he end, in any case.

That's why you so fervently love
Me in my weakness and in my sin;
That's why you impulsively gave
Me the best of your sons;
That's why you never even asked
Me for any word of him
And blackened my forever-deserted home
With fumes of praise.
And they say -- it's impossible to fuse more closely,
Impossible to love more abandonedly. . .

YOU are at least a Man, of men a King.
You have a heart, and with that heart you love.
The race you come from is not gendered of
The filthy sty whose latest litter cling
Round England's flesh-pots, gorged hogs gluttoning.
No, but on flaming battlefields, in courts
Of honour and of danger old resorts,
The name of Hohen-Zollern clear doth ring.
O Father William, you, not falsely weak,
Who never spared the rod to spoil the child,
Our mighty Germany, we only speak,
To bless you with a blessing sweet and mild,

By Sylvia if thy charming self be meant;
If friendship be thy virgin vows' extent,
O! let me in Aminta's praises join,
Hers my esteem shall be, my passion thine.
When for thy head the garland I prepare,
A second wreath shall bind Aminta's hair;
And when my choicest songs thy worth proclaim,
Alternate verse shall bless Aminta's name;
My heart shall own the justice of her cause,
And Love himself submit to Friendship's laws.
But if beneath thy numbers' soft disguise
Some favour'd swain, some true Alexis, lies;

My life's joy and incense: recollection of those hours
when I found and captured pleasure as I wanted it.
My life's joy and incense: that I refused
all indulgence in routine love affairs.

I never saw you, never grasped your hand,
Nor wrote nor read lines absence loves to trace,
Ne'er with you sate in your accustomed place,
Nor waited for your coming on sea or land.
But this I know, if along unseen strand,
Or anywhere in God's eternal space,
You heard my voice, or I beheld your face,
That we should greet, and both would understand.
So, till that hour, wherever you abide,
On circling star, or interstellar sea,
Or where, from man's imagination free,
There moves no planet and there sounds no tide,

It lies before me there, and my own breath
Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside
The living head I stood in honoured pride,
Talking of lovely things that conquer death.
Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath
Ran his fine fingers when he leant, blank-eyed,
And saw in fancy Adam and his bride
With their heaped locks, or his own Delphic wreath.

There seems a love in hair, though it be dead.
It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread
Of our frail plant,--a blossom from the tree

Gray pilgrim, you have journeyed far,
I pray you tell to me
Is there a land where Love is not,
By shore of any sea?

For I am weary of the god,
And I would flee from him
Tho' I must take a ship and go
Beyond the ocean's rim.

"I know a port where Love is not,
The ship is in your hand,
Then plunge your sword within your breast
And you will reach the land."