IV.

I shall not see your face again,

Nor hear your voice, nor press your hand,

O hardest fate, O heavy pain!

Like voices dear from a lost land

Which memory bears with doubtful wings
To men who have found foreign homes
After long toils and wanderings,

Agnes! even so your image comes
Ghostlike before me, night and day,

Comes, smiles, and ghostlike moves away,— I cry your mercy but you will not stay.

A voice said to me in my dreams,

66

"O bleeding heart, it ill beseems

The mourner, when the dust is thrown

Into the grave, and night has come,

To linger there, to weep, to moan

For the cold life which was his home;

Arise, begone! the night is wild,

Arise, take cheer, be reconciled."

"I cannot rise: strive not to break

The chains which link the quick and dead : The world is hard, and I am weak,

And look, my head is near her head; Give smiles, give laughter to the brave, And joy to them who have no fears, Lay cypress sadly on the grave,

And leave the mourner to his tears."

OFTEN when the benign moon with her beams
The face of night with tremulous beauty takes,
Touched through the tangled veil of midnight dreams
My heart unto itself low music makes.

Dawn comes, but whence the unwonted peace of mind Supplanting morn's too common meed of care,

Quiet and joy, a temper all resigned,

Indwelling where fierce pangs too often are?

Son! on your mother's breast last night you lay,
Nature bent over you, wondering and mild,
Breathed on you, kissed you softly, and to-day

Your flesh returns as that of a young child.

Not without pangs has she beheld you grow

To works and thoughts and woes beyond her ken, Not without yearning did she see you go

To mix in the unrestful life of men.

And though you scorn, neglect her, yet when most Baffled in strife, belated in the race,

With hot ambition fevered, tempest-tost

'Tis all her love can do-she turns a face

Upon your inward soul, fair still and full

Of a strong patient peace which salves all sores, In hushed communion, deep and wonderful, Imparting her heart's inner peace to yours;

In hours of rest, in lonely lovely places,

In the woods' voices or the speech of streams, In tender memories, in chastened faces,

Or, as last night, in the deep vale of dreams.

O BLEAK and chill o'er plain and vale and mountain

slope

The east wind goes:

The trees stand joyless, skies are cheerless, without

hope,

Deep, deep the snows:

The sheep are crowded by the hedge; no living thing Moves anywhere :

Folded away sleeps hope with buried seeds till Spring Bid her rise fair.

O, draw the curtain, love, shut out the waste of wold So dim, so drear;

Come to the fire and let me hold that head of gold As near as dear;

And let the snows heap o'er our roof a silent grave,

So we may prove

Safe from the cold which bites, the winds which rave,

One hour of love