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As though to hoard it for the haunt-Its fluted wreath, beaded beneath

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with drops

richest brown; the wild-rose spreads its breast

Of delicate pink, and the o'erhanging fir

Has dropped its dark, long cone.

SIR JOHN SUCKLING.

CONSTANCY.

OUT upon it! I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love thee more,
If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings,
Ere he shall discover

In the whole wide world again,
Such a constant lover.

But the spite on't is, no praise
Is due at all to me;

Love with me had made no stays,
Except it had been she.

Had it any been but she

And that very face,

There had been at least, ere this, A dozen in her place!

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WHY SO PALE AND WAN, FOND Why should two hearts in one breast

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lie,

And yet not lodge together? O love! where is thy sympathy, If thus our breasts thou sever?

But love is such a mystery,
I cannot find it out;

For when I think I'm best resolved,
I then am in most doubt.

Then farewell, care, and farewell,

woe,

I will no longer pine; For I'll believe I have her heart As much as she has mine.

EARL OF SURREY (HENRY HOWARD).

THE MEANS TO ATTAIN HAPPY IN PRAISE OF HIS
LIFE.

MARTIAL, the things that do attain
The happy life, be these, I find;
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet

mind:

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LADY-LOVE COMPARED WITH ALL OTHERS.

GIVE place, ye lovers, here before That spent your boasts and brags in vain;

My lady's beauty passeth more

The best of yours, I dare well

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ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

IN MEMORY OF BARRY CORNWALL.

IN the garden of death, where the singers whose names are deathless, One with another make music unheard of men,

Where the dead sweet roses fade not of lips long breathless,

And the fair eyes shine that shall weep not or change again, Who comes now crowned with the blossom of snow-white years? What music is this that the world of the dead men hears?

Beloved of men, whose words on our lips were honey,

Whose name in our ears and our fathers' ears was sweet,
Like summer gone forth of the land his songs made sunny,

To the beautiful veiled bright world where the glad ghosts meet,
Child, father, bridegroom and bride, and anguish and rest,
No soul shall pass of a singer than this more blest.

Blest for the years' sweet sake that were filled and brightened,
As a forest with birds, with the fruit and the flower of his song;
For the souls' sake blest that heard, and their cares were lightened,
For the hearts' sake blest that have fostered his name so long;
By the living and dead iips blest that have loved his name,
And clothed with their praise and crowned with their love for fame.
Ah, fair and fragrant his fame as flowers that close not,

That shrink not by day for heat or for cold by night,

As a thought in the heart shall increase when the heart's self knows not,
Shall endure in our ears as a sound, in our eyes as a light;
Shall wax with the years that wane and the seasons' chime,
As a white rose thornless that grows in the garden of time.

The same year calls, and one goes hence with another,
And men sit sad that were glad for their sweet songs' sake;
The same year beckons, and elder with younger brother
Takes mutely the cup from his hand that we all shall take.*
They pass ere the leaves be past or the snows be come;
And the birds are loud, but the lips that outsang them dumb.
Time takes them home that we loved, fair names and famous,
To the soft long sleep, to the broad sweet bosom of death;
But the flower of their souls he shall take not away to shame us,
Nor the lips lack song forever that now lack breath.
For with us shall the music and perfume that die not dwell,
Though the dead to our dead bid welcome, and we farewell.

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Takes through dim air her unawakened way,
The gracious ghost of morning risen ere morn.
With little unblown breasts and child-eyed looks
Following, the very maid, the girl-child spring,
Lifts windward her bright brows,

Dips her light feet in warm and moving brooks,
And kindles with her own mouth's coloring

The fearful firstlings of the plumeless boughs.

I seek thee sleeping, and awhile I see,

Fair face that art not, how thy maiden breath
Shall put at last the deadly days to death
And fill the fields, and fire the woods with thee,
And seaward hollows where my feet would be

When heaven shall hear the word that April saith,
To change the cold heart of the weary time,
To stir and soften all the time to tears,

Tears joyfuller than mirth;

As even to May's clear height the young days climb
With feet not swifter than those fair first years

Whose flowers revive not with thy flowers on earth.

I would not bid thee, though I might, give back
One good thing youth has given and borne away;
I crave not any comfort of the day

That is not, nor on time's retrodden track
Would turn to meet the white-robed hours or black
That long since left me on their mortal way;
Nor light nor love that has been, nor the breath
That comes with morning from the sun to be
And sets light hope on fire:

No fruit, no flower thought once too fair for death,
No flower nor hour once fallen from life's green tree,
No leaf once plucked or once-fulfilled desire.

The morning song beneath the stars that fled
With twilight through the moonless mountain air,
While youth with burning lips and wreathless hair
Sang toward the sun that was to crown his head,
Rising; the hopes that triumphed and fell dead,

The sweet swift eyes and songs of hours that were:
These may'st thou not give back forever; these,
As at the sea's heart all her wrecks lie waste,
Lie deeper than the sea;

But flowers thou may'st, and winds, and hours of ease,
And all its April to the world thou may'st
Give back, and half my April back to me.

A FORSAKEN GARDEN.

IN a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,

To the low last edge of the long lone sand.

If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

Would a ghost not rise of the strange guest's hand?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled

That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;

The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not;

As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry; From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not, Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.

Over the meadows that blossom and wither

Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;

Only the sun and the rain come hither,
All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels

One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.

Only the wind here hovers and revels

In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply, of lovers none ever will know,

Whose eyes went seaward, a hundred sleeping

Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "Look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die—but we?"

And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,

In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end-but what end who knows?

Love deep as the sea, as a rose must wither,

As the rose-red sea-weed that mocks the rose.

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