Twinkled in firmament! cool gloaming's prime
Cheerer, whose fairness maketh wondrous fair
Old pastorals, and the Spenserian rhyme :-
Thy soft seduction doth my soul enthral
Like music, with a dying, dying fall!

There are three bonnie Scottish melodies,
So native to the music of my soul,
That of its humors they seem prophecies.
The ravishment of Chaucer was less whole,
Less perfect, when the April nightingale

Let itself in upon him. Surely, Lord!
Before whom psaltery and clarichord,
Concentual with saintly song, prevail,

There lurks some subtile sorcery, to Thee And heaven akin, in each woe-burning air! "Land of the Leal," and "Bonnie Bessie Lee,"

And "Home sweet Home," the lilt of love's despair.

Now, in remembrance even, the feelings speak,

For lo! a shower of grace is on my cheek.

Oh, the impassable sorrow, mother mine!

Of the sweet, mournful air which, clear and well,

For me thou singest! Never the divine

Mohammedan harper, famous Israfel, Such rich enchanting luxury of woe

Elicited from all his golden strings!

Therefore, dear singer sad! chant clear, and low,

And lovingly, the bard's imaginings. O poet unknown! conning thy verses o'er In lone, dim places, sorrowfully sweet; And O musician! touching the quick core Of pity, when thy skilful closes meetMy tears confess your witchery as they flow, Since I, too, wear away like the unenduring

Like glorious book of silent prophecy;

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Majestic Night assume her starry throne; The wondrous seasons come and go: but we Die, and to mortal ken forever gone. Who shall pry further? who shall kindle light In the dread bosom of the infinite?

O thou of purer eyes than to behold
Uncleanness! sift my soul, removing all
Strange thoughts, imaginings fantastical,
Iniquitous allurements manifold.
Make it a spiritual ark; abode

Severely sacred, perfumed, sanctified, Wherein the Prince of Purities may abideThe holy and eternal Spirit of God.

The gross, adhesive loathsomeness of sin, Give me to see. Yet, O far more, far more, That beautiful purity which the saints adore In a consummate Paradise within The Veil-O Lord, upon my soul bestow, An earnest of that purity here below.

SNOW.

Flowers upon the summer lea,

Daisies, kingcups, pale primroses-
These are sung from sea to sea,

As many a darling rhyme discloses.
Tangled wood and hawthorn dale
In many a songful snatch prevail;
But never yet, as well I mind,
In all their verses can I find
A simple tune, with quiet flow,
To match the falling of the snow.

Oh, weary passed each winter day,
And windily howled each winter night;
Oh, miry grew each village way,

And mists enfolded every height;
And ever on the window-pane

A froward gust blew down with rain,
And day by day in tawny brown

The Luggie stream came heaving down:-
I could have fallen asleep and dreamed
Until again spring sunshine gleamed.

And what! said I, is this the mode
That Winter kings it now-a-days?
The robin keeps his own abode,

And pipes his independent lays.
I've seen the day on Merkland Hill,
That snow has fallen with a will,
Even in November! Now, alas!
The whole year round we see the grass :-
Ah, winter now may come and go
Without a single fall of snow.

It was the latest day but one

Of winter, as I questioned thus; And sooth! an angry mood was on,

As at a thing most scandalous;-
When lo! some hailstones on the pane
With sudden tinkle rang amain,
Till in an ecstasy of joy

I clapped and shouted like a boy-
Oh, rain may come and rain may go,
But what can match the falling snow!

Dim on a sloping hillside, clothed in a misty pall,

Stands a turret gray and hoary, where the ancient ivies crawl,

Their Arab arms round casement, sill, and door, and mould'ring wall.

And there we halted half an hour within a roofless hall,

'Neath a bower of wildest ivy hanging downward from the wall,

Bearing in its grand luxuriance a flower funereal.

There we talked of the gay plumes erst bent to pass the lintel old,

The maidens that were moved to smile at gallant wooers bold,

The jovial nights of brave carouse, the winecups manifold.

And all the faded glories of the mediaval time,

When the age was in its manhood, and the land was in its prime,

And manly deeds were chanted in a bold heroic rhyme.

Then, plucking each a sprig, bedecked with simple yellow flower,

We scrambled sadly downward from our old enchanted bower,

And the glory of the sunshine fell upon us like a shower.

Once more beneath the concave of a clear effulgent sky,

Where flocks of cawing rooks to the mansion wavered by-

A mansion standing coldly 'mid a windy rookery.

And over breezy mountains, where the poacher, with his gun,

Stood lonely as a bowlder-stone, 'tween earth and shining sun,

We wandered and we pondered till the winter day was done.

BY THE FIRE.

Он, many a leaf will fall to-night,

As she wanders through the wood! And many an angry gust will break The dreary solitude.

I wonder if she's past the bridge,
Where Luggie moans beneath;
While rain-drops clash in planted lines
On rivulet and heath.
Disease hath laid his palsied palm

Upon my aching brow;
The headlong blood of twenty-one
Is thin and sluggish now.
'Tis nearly ten! A fearful night,
Without a single star

To light the shadow on her soul
With sparkle from afar:
The moon is canopied with clouds,
And her burden it is sore;-

What would wee Jackie do, if he

Should never see her more?
Ay, light the lamp, and hang it up

At the window fair and free;
'T will be a beacon on the hill
To let your mother see.
And trim it well, my little Ann,

For the night is wet and cold,
And you know the weary, winding way
Across the miry wold.

All drenched will be her simple gown,
And the wet will reach her skin:
I wish that I could wander down,
And the red quarry win,

To take the burden from her back,

And place it upon mine;
With words of cheerful condolence,
Not uttered to repine.

You have a kindly mother, dears,

As ever bore a child,

And Heaven knows I love her well
In passion undefiled.

Ah me! I never thought that she
Would brave a night like this,
While I sat weaving by the fire

A web of fantasies.

How the winds beat this home of ours With arrow-falls of rain;

This lonely home upon the hill

They beat with might and main. And 'mid the tempest one lone heart Anticipates the glow,

Whence, all her weary journey done,
Shall happy welcome flow.
'Tis after ten! Oh, were she here,
Young man although I be,

I could fall down upon her neck,
And weep right gushingly!

I have not loved her half enough,
The dear old toiling one,
The silent watcher by my bed,
In shadow or in sur.

THE ANEMONE.

I HAVE wandered far to-day,
In a pleased unquiet way;
Over hill and songful hollow,
Vernal byways, fresh and fair,
Did I simple fancies follow;
Till, upon a hillside bare,
Suddenly I chanced to see
A little white anemone.

Beneath a clump of furze it grew;
And never mortal eye did view
Its rathe and slender beauty, till
I saw it in no mocking mood;
For with it sweetness did it fill

To me the ample solitude.
A fond remembrance made me see
Strange light in the anemone.

One April day when I was seven,
Beneath the clear and deepening heaven,
My father, God preserve him! went

With me a Scottish mile and more;

And in a playful merriment

He decked my bonnet o'er and o'erTo fling a sunshine on his easeWith tenderest anemones.

Now, gentle reader, as I live,
This snowy little bloom did give
My being most endearing throes.

I saw my father in his prime;
But youth it comes, and youth it goes,

And he has spent his blithest time: Yet dearer grown through all to me, And dearer the anemone.

So with the spirit of a sage

I plucked it from its hermitage,
And placed it 'tween the sacred leaves
Of Agnes' Eve at that rare part
Where she her fragrant robe unweaves,
And with a gently beating heart,
In troubled bliss and balmy woe,
Lies down to dream of Porphyro.

Let others sing of that and this,
In war and science find their bliss;
Vainly they seek and will not find
The subtle lore that Nature brings
Unto the reverential mind,

The pathos worn by common things,
By every flower that lights the lea,
And by the pale anemone.

MY BROTHER.

THE goldening peach on the orchard-wall,
Soft feeding in the sun,

Hath never so downy and rosy a cheek
As this laughing little one.

The brook that murmurs and dimples alone
Through glen, and grove, and lea,

Hath never a life so merry and true

As my brown little brother of three.

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From flower to flower, and from bower to bower, In my mother's garden green,

A-peering at this, and a-cheering at that,

The funniest ever was seen;

Now throwing himself in his mother's lap,
With his cheek upon her breast,

He tells his wonderful travels, forsooth!
And chatters himself to rest.

And what may become of that brother of mine,
Asleep in his mother's bosom?

Will the wee rosy bud of his being, at last
Into a wild-flower blossom?

Will the hopes that are deepening as silent and fair

As the azure about his eye,

Be told in glory and motherly pride,

Or answered with a sigh?

Let the curtain rest: for, alas! 't is told

That mercy's hand benign

Hath woven and spun the gossamer thread

That forms the fabric so fine.

Then dream, dearest Jackie! thy sinless dream,
And waken as blithe and as free;

There's many a change in twenty long years,
My brown little brother of three.

Then I'd renounce that doubtful sage, And walk to Burnham-beeches."

"Agreed," I said. "For Socrates
(I find he too is talking)
Thinks Learning can't remain at ease
While Beauty goes a-walking."

She read no more. I leaped the sill;
The sequel's scarce essential-
Nay, more than this, I hold it still
Profoundly confidential.

A LADY.

A GARDEN IDYL.

THE LADY.

A POET.

SIR POET, ere you crossed the lawn (If it was wrong to watch you, pardon), Behind this weeping birch withdrawn,

I watched you saunter round the garden. I saw you bend beside the phlox,

Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle, Review my well-ranged hollyhocks,

Smile at the fountain's slender spurtle;

You paused beneath the cherry-tree,

Where my marauder thrush was singing, Peered at the bee-hives curiously,

And narrowly escaped a stinging; And then-you see I watched-you passed Down the espalier walk that reaches Out to the western wall, and last

Dropped on the seat before the peaches.

What was your thought? You waited long.
Sublime or graceful,-grave,-satiric?
A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song?
A tender Tennysonian lyric?
Tell me. That garden-seat shall be,
So long as speech renown disperses,
Illustrious as the spot where he-
The gifted Blank-composed his verses.

THE POET.

Madam,-whose uncensorious eye
Grows gracious over certain pages,
Wherein the Jester's maxims lie,

It may be, thicker than the Sage's-
I hear but to obey, and could

Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you, Some verse as whimsical as Hood,

As gay as Praed,—should answer to you.

But, though the common voice proclaims
Our only serious vocation
Contined to giving nothing names,

And dreams a "local habitation;"
Believe me, there are tuneless days,

When neither marble, brass, nor vellum, Would profit much by any lays

That haunt the poet's cerebellum.

More empty things, I fear, than rhymes, More idle things than songs, absorb it;

The "finely-frenzied " eye, at times,
Reposes mildly in its orbit;
And, painful truth, at times, to him,
Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive,
"A primrose by a river's brim"

Is absolutely unsuggestive.

The fickle Muse! As ladies will,

She sometimes wearies of her wooer;

A goddess, yet a woman still,
She flies the more that we pursue her;
In short, with worst as well as best,
Five months in six, your hapless poet

Is just as prosy as the rest,

But cannot comfortably show it.

725

Of love that came and love that went,-
Some fragrance of a lost flirtation,
Born when the cuckoo changes song,
Dead ere the apple's red is on it,
That should have been an epic long,
Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet.

Or else you thought,-the murmuring noon,
He turns it to a lyric sweeter,
With birds that gossip in the tune,

And windy bough-swing in the metre;
Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms

Recall some dream of harp-pressed bosoms, Round singing mouths, and chanted charms, And mediæval orchard-blossoms,-

Quite à la mode. Alas for prose,—
My vagrant fancies only rambled
Back to the red-walled Rectory close,
Where first my graceless boyhood gambolled,
Climbed on the dial, teased the fish,
And chased the kitten round the beeches,
Till widening instincts made me wish
For certain slowly-ripening peaches.

Three peaches. Not the Graces three
Had more equality of beauty:

I would not look, yet went to see;
I wrestled with Desire and Duty;
I felt the pangs of those who feel
The Laws of Property beset them;
The conflict made my reason reel,

And, half-abstractedly, I ate them;—

Or Two of them. Forthwith Despair-
More keen that one of these was rotten-
Moved me to seek some forest lair
Where I might hide and dwell forgotten,
Attired in skins, by berries stained,

Absolved from brushes and ablution;But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained, Fate gave me up to execution.

I saw it all but now. The grin

That gnarled old Gardener Sandy's features;
My father, scholar-like and thin,
Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;

I saw-ah me-I saw again
My dear and deprecating mother;
And then, remembering the cane,
Regretted that I'd left the other.