If any vague desire should rise,That holy Death ere Arthur diedHad moved me kindly from his side,And dropt the dust on tearless eyes; Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,The grief my loss in him had wrought,A grief as deep as life or thought,But stay’d in peace with God and man. I make a picture in […]

More than my brothers are to me,’—Let this not vex thee, noble heart!I know thee of what force thou artTo hold the costliest love in fee. But thou and I are one in kind,As moulded like in Nature’s mint;And hill and wood and field did printThe same sweet forms in either mind. For us the […]

  Again at Christmas did we weaveThe holly round the Christmas hearth;The silent snow possess’d the earth,And calmly fell our Christmas-eve: The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,No wing of wind the region swept,But over all things brooding sleptThe quiet sense of something lost. As in the winters left behind,Again our ancient games had place,The mimic […]

What hope is here for modern rhymeTo him, who turns a musing eyeOn songs, and deeds, and lives, that lieForeshorten’d in the tract of time? These mortal lullabies of painMay bind a book, may line a box,May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;Or when a thousand moons shall wane A man upon a stall may […]

LXXVITake wings of fancy, and ascend,And in a moment set thy faceWhere all the starry heavens of spaceAre sharpen’d to a needle’s end; Take wings of foresight; lighten thro’The secular abyss to come,And lo, thy deepest lays are dumbBefore the mouldering of a yew; And if the matin songs, that wokeThe darkness of our planet, […]

As sometimes in a dead man’s face,To those that watch it more and more,A likeness, hardly seen before,Comes out—to some one of his race: So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,I see thee what thou art, and knowThy likeness to the wise below,Thy kindred with the great of old. But there is more than I […]

So many worlds, so much to do,So little done, such things to be,How know I what had need of thee,For thou wert strong as thou wert true? The fame is quench’d that I foresaw,The head hath miss’d an earthly wreath:I curse not nature, no, nor death;For nothing is that errs from law. We pass; the […]

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,And howlest, issuing out of night,With blasts that blow the poplar white,And lash with storm the streaming pane? Day, when my crown’d estate begunTo pine in that reverse of doom,Which sicken’d every living bloom,And blurr’d the splendour of the sun; Who usherest in the dolorous hourWith thy quick tears that […]

Sleep, kinsman thou to death and tranceAnd madness, thou hast forged at lastA night-long Present of the PastIn which we went thro’ summer France. Hadst thou such credit with the soul?Then bring an opiate trebly strong,Drug down the blindfold sense of wrongThat so my pleasure may be whole; While now we talk as once we […]

I cannot see the features right,When on the gloom I strive to paintThe face I know; the hues are faintAnd mix with hollow masks of night; Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,A hand that points, and palled shapesIn shadowy thoroughfares of thought; And crowds that stream from yawning doors,And shoals […]