Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note,

And watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase,

Nor the cannon-bullet rust on a slothful shore,

And the cobweb woven across the cannon's throat

Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.

III.

And as months ran on and rumor of battle grew,

"It is time, it is time, O passionate heart," said I

(For I cleave to a cause that I felt to be pure and true),

"It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,

That old hysterical mock-disease should die."

And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath

With a loyal people shouting a battle ery,

Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly

Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

IV.

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims

Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,

And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;

And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd!

Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep

For those that are crush'd in the clash of jarring claims,

Yet God's just wrathi shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

And noble thought be freer under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with one desire ;

For the peace, that I deem'd no peace, is over and done,

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of tire.

V.

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,

We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,

And nothing perfect: yet the brook he loved,

For which, in branding summers of Bengal,

Or even the sweet half-English Neilgherry air

I panted, seems, as I re-listen to it, Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,

To me that loved him; for () Brook,' he says,

"O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,

Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? replies:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And half a hundred bridges. Till last by Philip's farm I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go But I go on for ever.

66

Poor lad, he died at Florence quite worn out,

Travelling to Naples. There is Darnley bridge,

It has more ivy; there the river; and there

Stands Philip's farm where brook and river meet.

I chatter over stony ways,

In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret,
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.

"But Philip chattered more than brook or bird,

Old Philip; all about the fields you caught

His weary daylong chirping, like the dry

High-elbow'd grigs that leap in summer grass.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.
And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel.
And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

"O darling Katie Willows, his one child!

A maiden of our century, yet most meek;

A daughter of our meadow, yet not

To Katie somewhere in the walks below,

Run, Katie !' Katie never ran: she moved

To meet me, winding under woodbine bowers,

A little flutter'd, with her eyelids down, Fresh apple- blossom, blushing for a boon.

"What was it? less of sentiment than sense

Had Katie; not illiterate; nor of those Who dabbling in the fount of fictive tears,

And nursed by mealy-mouthed philan thropies,

Divorce the Feeling from her mate the Deed.

"She told me. She and James had quarrell'd. Why?

What cause of quarrel? None, she said, no cause ;

James had no cause: but when I prest

the cause,

I learnt that James had flickering jealousies

Which anger'd her. Who anger'd James? I said.

But Katie snatch'd her eyes at once from mine,

And sketching with her slender-pointed foot

Some figure like a wizard's pentagram On garden gravel, let my query pass Unclaim'd, in flushing silence, till I

ask'd

For in I went, and call'd old Philip

out

To show the farm: full willingly he

rose:

He led me thro' the short sweet-smelling lanes

Of his wheat-suburb, babbling as he went.

He praised his land, his horses, his machines;

He praised his ploughs, his cows, his hogs, his dogs;

He praised his hens, his geese, his guinea-hens;

His pigeons, who in session on their roofs

Approved him, bowing at their own deserts:

Then from the plaintive mother's teat he took

Her blind and shuddering puppies, naming each,

And naming those, his friends, for whom they were:

Then rost the common into Darnley chase

To show Sir Arthur's deer. In copse and fern

Twinkled the innumerable ear and tail. Then, seated on a serpent-rooted beech,

He pointed out a pasturing colt, and said:

"That was the four year-old I sold the Squire.'

And there he told a long long-winded tale

Of how the Squire had seen the colt at grass,

And how it was the thing his daughter wish'd,

And how he sent the bailiff to the farm To learn the price, and what the price he ask'd,

And how the bailiff swore that he was mad,

But he stood firm and so the matter hung:

He gave them line: and five days after that

He met the bailiff at the Golden Fleece, Who then and there had offer'd something more,

But he stood firm, and so the matter hung;

He knew the man; the colt would fetch its price;

He gave thein line: and how by chance at last

(It might be May or April, he forgot, The last of April or the first of May) He found the bailiff riding by the farm, And, talking from the point he drew him in,

And there he mellow'd all his heart with ale,

Until they closed a bargain, hand in hand.

'Then, while I breathed in sight of haven, he,

Poor fellow, could he help it? recommenced,

And ran thro' all the coltish chronicle, Wild Will, Black Bess, Tantivy, Tallyho,

Reform, White Rose, Bellerophon, the Jilt.

Arbaces, and Phenomenon, and the rest,

Till, not to die listener, I arose,
And with me Philip, talking still; and

SO

We turn'd our foreheads from the falling sun,

And following our own shadows thrice as long

As when they follow'd us from Philip's door,

Arrived, and found the sun of sweet content

Re-risen in Katie's eyes, and all things well.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

Yes, men may come and go; and these

are gone,

All gone. My dearest brother, Edmund sleeps.

Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire,

But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome Of Brunelleschi, sleeps in peace and he,

Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words

Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb : I scraped the lichen from it: Katie

walks

By the long wash of Australasian seas Far off, and holds her head to other

stars,

And breathes in converse seasons. All are gone."

So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a style

In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind

Old waifs of rhyme, and bowing o'er the brook

A tonsured head in middle age forlorn, Mused, and was mute. On a sudden a

low breath

Of tender air made tremble in the hedge