A Spartan, his companion slain,
Alone from battle fled;
His mother, kindling with disdain
That she had borne him, struck him dead;
For courage, and not birth alone,
In Sparta, testifies a son!

ONCE for thy brow a wreath I wished to wind,
And, seeking long, I could no flowers find.
Now golden flowers are blooming far and near,
But, ah! dear love, thou art no longer here.

ÆGLE, beauty and poet, has two little crimes;
She makes her own face, and does not make her rhymes.

A flower, or the ghost of a flower!
Mist, or the soul of it, felt
In the secret night's mid hour,
Lost on the morning air!
Who shall recover it,--beauty born to melt
As the apparition of blossom brief and shy,
As the cloud in the sky that vanishes, who knows where?

YET oft, to hear the echoes ring and stir
That vacant valley like a dulcimer,
I flung her name against the naked hills,
And crimsoned all the air with thoughts of her.

Let me this gondola boat compare to the slumberous cradle,
And to a spacious bier liken the cover demure;
Thus on the Great Canal through life we are swaying and swimming
Onward with never a care, coffin and cradle between.

O Son of mine, when dusk shall find thee bending
Between a gravestone and a cradle's head---
Between the love whose name is loss unending
And the young love whose thoughts are liker dread,---
Thou too shalt groan at heart that all thy spending
Cannot repay the dead, the hungry dead.

Dear is that valley to the murmuring bees;
And all, who know it, come and come again.
The small birds build there; and, at summer-noon,
Oft have I heard a child, gay among the flowers,
As in the shining grass she sate concealed,
Sing to herself…….

The sun may set and rise,
But we, contrariwise,
Sleep, after our short light,
One everlasting night.

I lie in the bath and I contemplate the toilet-paper:
Scottissue, 1000 sheets –
What a lot of pissin and shittin,
What a lot of pissin and shittin,
Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats –
All the poems of Shelley and Keats.