The forest cracked, the waters curled, And wildly dashed on tower and tree And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass That makes the barren branches loud; The wild unrest that lives in woe That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a laboring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire. XVI. WHAT words are these have fallen from me? Can calm despair and wild unrest Be tenants of a single breast, Or sorrow such a changeling be? Or doth she only seem to take The touch of change in calm or storm; In her deep self, than some dead lake Hung in the shadow of a heaven? And staggers blindly ere she sink? And stunned me from my power to think, And all my knowledge of myself; VOL. II. 2 And made me that delirious man Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan ? XVII. THOU comest, much wept for; such a breeze Compelled thy canvas, and my prayer Was as the whisper of an air To breathe thee over lonely seas. For I in spirit saw thee move Through circles of the bounding sky; Henceforth, wherever thou mayst roam, So may whatever tempest mars Mid-ocean spare thee, sacred bark; And balmy drops in summer dark Slide from the bosom of the stars. So kind an office hath been done, Such precious relics brought by thee; Till all my widowed race be run. XVIII. 'Tis well, 'tis something, we may stand Where he in English earth is laid, And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land. "Tis little; but it looks in truth And in the places of his youth. Come, then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep; And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead. Ah! yet, even yet, if this might be, Would, breathing through his lips, impart The life that almost dies in me: That dies not, but endures with pain, And slowly forms the firmer mind, Treasuring the look it cannot find, The words that are not heard again. XIX. THE Danube to the Severn gave The darkened heart that beat no more; And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a day the Severn fills, The Wye is hushed nor moved along; And hushed my deepest grief of all, I brim with sorrow drowning song. The tide flows down, the wave again XX. THE lesser griefs, that may be said, Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fulness from the mind. "It will be hard," they say, "to find Another service such as this." My lighter moods are like to these, That out of words a comfort win; But there are other griefs within, And tears that at their fountain freeze; For by the hearth the children sit Cold in that atmosphere of Death, And scarce endure to draw the breath, Or like to noiseless phantoms flit; But open converse is there none, So much the vital spirits sink To see the vacant chair, and think, "How good! how kind! and he is gone." XXI. I SING to him that rests below, And, since the grasses round me wave, And make them pipes whereon to blow. The traveller hears me now and then, And sometimes harshly will he speak : And melt the waxen hearts of men." Another answers, "Let him be; He loves to make parade of pain, That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy.” A third is wroth: "Is this an hour For private sorrow's barren song, When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power? "A time to sicken and to swoon, When science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon? Behold, ye speak an idle thing: And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged: And one is sad; her note is changed, Because her brood is stolen away. XXII. THE path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Through four sweet years arose and fell, From flower to flower, from snow to snow. And we with singing cheered the way, |