"Death is to us change, not consummation."
Heart of Midlothian.

A change! no, surely, not a change,
   The change must be before we die;
Death may confer a wider range,
   From pole to pole, from sea to sky,
It cannot make me new or strange
   To mine own Personality!

For what am I? -- this mortal flesh,
   These shrinking nerves, this feeble frame,
For ever racked with ailments fresh
   And scarce from day to day the same --

When the light falls on winter evenings
And the river makes no sound in its passing
Behind the house, is silent but for its cold
Flowing, its reeds frozen stiffer than glass
How can one anticipate the dawn, a sudden
Blazing of sunlight thawing the harshest sky?
How can one not remember summer evenings?
Must not the tired heart sink and must not fear
Bite, like an acid, wrinkles in its stone?


Behind drawn curtains, gazing at the fire,
Think how the earth spins dumb and bound
By iron chains of frost through death-still air;

Perhaps I asked too large --
I take -- no less than skies --
For Earths, grow thick as
Berries, in my native town --

My Basked holds -- just -- Firmaments --
Those -- dangle easy -- on my arm,
But smaller bundles -- Cram.

In the pathway of the sun,
In the footsteps of the breeze,
Where the world and sky are one,
He shall ride the silver seas,
He shall cut the glittering wave.
I shall sit at home, and rock;
Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;
Brew my tea, and snip my thread;
Bleach the linen for my bed.
They will call him brave.

I

IN EXCELSIS

Two dwellings, Peace, are thine.
One is the mountain-height,
Uplifted in the loneliness of light
Beyond the realm of shadows,--fine,
And far, and clear,--where advent of the night
Means only glorious nearness of the stars,
And dawn, unhindered, breaks above the bars
That long the lower world in twilight keep.
Thou sleepest not, and hast no need of sleep,
For all thy cares and fears have dropped away;
The night's fatigue, the fever-fret of day,
Are far below thee; and earth's weary wars,

IN a forest, far away,
One small creeklet, day by day,
Murmurs only this sad lay:
‘Peace be with thee, Lilian.’

One old box-tree bends his head,
One broad wattle shades her bed,
One lone magpie mourns the dead:
‘Peace be with thee, Lilian.’

Echoes come on every breeze,
Sighing through the ancient trees,
Whisp’ring in their melodies:
‘Peace be with thee, Lilian.’

Mellow sunbeams, morn and eve,
Quick to come and slow to leave,

Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon's knife!
And almost a year to creep back into strength,
Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
Found me my seeming self again.
We walked the forest together,
By a path of soundless moss and turf.
But I could not look in your eyes,
And you could not look in my eyes,
For such sorrow was ours -- the beginning of gray in your hair,
And I but a shell of myself.
And what did we talk of? -- sky and water,
Anything, 'most, to hide our thoughts.
And then your gift of wild roses,

I


Paul, let thy faces from the canvas look
Haply less clearly than Pietro's can,
Less lively than in tints of Titian,
Or him who both the bay-wreath-chaplets took:
Yet shalt thou therefore have no harsh rebuke
Of me whom, while with eager eye I scan
O'er painted pomps of Brera and Vatican,
The first delight thou gavest ne'er forsook.
For in thy own Verona, long ago,
Before one masterpiece of cool arcades,
I made a friend; and such a friend was rare.
For him, I love thy velvet's glorious show,

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it.
I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil
and its head bent low with patience.

The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish,
and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.

Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests,
and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.

I.

Dead and gone, the days we had together,
Shadow-stricken all the lights that shone
Round them, flown as flies the blown foam's feather,
Dead and gone.

Where we went, we twain, in time foregone,
Forth by land and sea, and cared not whether,
If I go again, I go alone.

Bound am I with time as with a tether;
Thee perchance death leads enfranchised on,
Far from deathlike life and changeful weather,
Dead and gone.

II.

Above the sea and sea-washed town we dwelt,
We twain together, two brief summers, free