Stars.

91

The Stars.

(To J. D.)

SESTINA.

Stars in the sky, fold upon fold of stars!

And still beyond the stars those gulfs of air

Flecked soft and pale with milkier stars beyond,

Millions of miles above our dusky world:

Pale stars, whose light down the unplumbed abyss

Falls, ere it reach us, through a thousand years.

There was a God in the unwritten years

Who lit the flaming order of the stars:

Let there be Light! He said, and lo! the abyss

Grew live and tremulous with rustling air,

Grew bright with stars and moons, and each a world

Shining, a light to other worlds beyond.

O were you even as we, bright orbs beyond

Who shine and shed your glory all these years,

Not light, but smoke would fall from every world;

Smoke, black with human evil, black, O stars

With His neglect who lit the sparkling air;

But left within—unformed and void—the Abyss.

92O stars that dance indifferent in the Abyss,

Our Earth may seem as bright to you beyond;

Yourselves, to them that breathe your delicate air,

As desolate; Life in the Lunar years

As long; and the straight rivers of the stars

And primal snows divide as drear a world.

And men, perchance, as we, in every world

Fill with their dreams the bright and vast abyss:

A Christ has died in vain on all the stars,

And each, unhappy, seeks a star beyond

Where God rewards the dead through endless years....

And so we circle, dumb, in the silent air.

What shall we find more holy in all the air?

Lo, when the first huge, incandescent world

Burst out of Chaos and flamed a million years,

Until, with too much flaming, thro’ the abyss

Flake after flake dropped off and flamed beyond:—

That was the God who lit the host of stars!

For Light, the stars; for breath, the realms of air;

For Hope, beyond this dark and suffering world,

Nought in the Abyss, nor ought in the endless years.

93

Etruscan Tombs.

I.

To think the face we love shall ever die,

And be the indifferent earth, and know us not!

To think that one of us shall live to cry

On one long buried in a distant spot!

O wise Etruscans, faded in the night

Yourselves, with scarce a rose-leaf on your trace;

You kept the ashes of the dead in sight,

And shaped the vase to seem the vanished face.

But, O my Love, my life is such an urn

That tender memories mould with constant touch,

Until the dust and earth of it they turn

To your dear image that I love so much:

A sacred urn, filled with the sacred past,

That shall recall you while the clay shall last.

%center%II.

94These cinerary urns with human head

And human arms that dangle at their sides,

The earliest potters made them for their dead,

To keep the mother’s ashes or the bride’s.

O rude attempt of some long-spent despair—

With symbol and with emblem discontent—

To keep the dead alive and as they were,

The actual features and the glance that went!

The anguish of your art was not in vain,

For lo, upon these alien shelves removed

The sad immortal images remain,

And show that once they lived and once you loved.

But oh, when I am dead may none for me

Invoke so drear an immortality!

%center%III.

Beneath the branches of the olive yard

Are roots where cyclamen and violet grow

Beneath the roots the earth is deep and hard

And there a king was buried long ago.

95The peasants digging deeply in the mould

Cast up the autumn soil about the place,

And saw a gleam of unexpected gold,

And underneath the earth a living face.

With sleeping lids and rosy lips he lay

Among the wreaths and gems that mark the king

One moment; then a little dust and clay

Fell shrivelled over wreath and urn and ring.

A carven slab recalls his name and deeds,

Writ in a language no man living reads.

%center%IV.

Here lies the tablet graven in the past,

Clear-charactered and firm and fresh of line.

See, not a word is gone; and yet how fast

The secret no man living may divine!

What did he choose for witness in the grave?

A record of his glory on the earth?

The wail of friends? The Pæans of the brave?

The sacred promise of the second birth?

The tombs of ancient Greeks in Sicily

Are sown with slender discs of graven gold

96Filled with the praise of Death: “Thrice happy he

Wrapt in the milk-soft sleep of dreams untold!”

They sleep their patient sleep in altered lands,

The golden promise in their fleshless hands.

97

Venetian Nocturne.

Down the narrow Calle where the moonlight cannot enter,

The houses are so high;

Silent and alone we pierced the night’s dim core and centre—

Only you and I.

Clear and sad our footsteps rang along the hollow pavement,

Sounding like a bell;

Sounding like a voice that cries to souls in Life’s enslavement,

“There is Death as well!”

Down the narrow dark we went, until a sudden whiteness

Made us hold our breath;

All the white Salute towers and domes in moonlit brightness,—

Ah! could this be Death?

98

The Dead Friend.

I.

When you were alive, at least,

There were days I never met you.

In the study, at the feast,

By the hearth, I could forget you.

Moods there were of many days

When, methinks, I did not mind you.

Now, oh now, in any place

Wheresoe’er I go, I find you!

You ... but how profoundly changed,

O you dear-belov’d dead woman!

Made mysterious and estranged,

All-pervading, superhuman.

Ah! to meet you as of yore,

Kind, alert, and quick to laughter:

You, the friend I loved Before;

Not this tragic friend of After.

%center%II.

The house was empty where you came no more;

I sat in awe and dread;

When, lo! I heard a hand that shook the door,

And knew it was the Dead.

99One moment—ah!—the anguish took my side,

The fainting of the will.

“God of the living, leave me not!” I cried,

And all my flesh grew chill.

One moment; then I opened wide my heart

And open flung the door:

“What matter whence thou comest, what thou art?—

Come to me!”... Never more

%center%III.

They lie at peace, the darkness fills

The hollow of their empty gaze.

The dust falls in their ears and stills

The echo of our fruitless days;

The earth takes back their baser part;

The brain no longer bounds the dream;

The broken vial of the heart

Lets out its passion in a stream.

And in this silence that they have

One inner vision grows more bright;

The Dead remember in the grave

As I remember here to-night.

(1890.)

100

Sonnet.

Since childhood have I dragged my life along

The dusty purlieus and approach of Death,

Hoping the years would bring me easier breath,

And turn my painful sighing to a song;

But, ah, the years have done me cruel wrong,

For they have robbed me of that happy faith;

Still in the world of men I move a wraith,

Who to the shadow-world not yet belong.

Too long, indeed, I linger here and take

The room of others but to droop and sigh;

Wherefore, O spinning sisters, for my sake,

No more the little tangled knots untie;

But all the skein, I do beseech you, break,

And spin a stronger thread more perfectly.

101

Song.

Oh for the wings of a dove,

To fly far away from my own soul,

Reach and be merged in the vast whole

Heaven of infinite Love!

Oh that I were as the rain,

To fall and be lost in the great sea,

One with the waves, till the drowned Me

Might not be severed again!

Infinite arms of the air,

Surrounding the stars and without strife

Blending our life with their large life,

Lift me and carry me there!

102

A Classic Landscape.

This wood might be some Grecian heritage

Of the antique world, this hoary ilex wood;

So broad the shade, so deep the solitude,

So grey the air where Oread fancies brood.

Beyond, the fields are tall with purple sage;

The sky bends downward like a purple sheet—

A purple wind-filled sail—i’ the noonday heat;

And past the river shine the fields of wheat.

O tender wheat, O starry saxifrage,

O deep-red tulips, how the fields are fair!

Far off the mountains pierce the quivering air,

Ash-coloured, mystical, remote, and bare.

How far they look, the Mountains of Mirage

Or northern Hills of Heaven, how far away!

In front the long paulonia-blossoms sway

From leafless boughs across that dreamy grey.

103O world, how worthy of a golden age!

How might Theocritus have sung and found

The Oreads here, the Naiads gathering round,

Their pallid locks still dripping to the ground!

For me, O world, thou art how mere a stage,

Whereon the human soul must act alone,

In a dead language, with the plot unknown,

Nor learn what happens when the play is done.

104

Old Songs.

This song I wrote—ah me, how long ago!

When up the stair of Heaven and down again

(For even then I did not long remain),

With happy feet I used to come and go.

This ode I sang beneath a laurel-bough

Where I had sought for Truth among the dead;

This little verse (and still the page is red),

To soothe some easier pang forgotten now.

I took the dew of lilies grown apart;

The scanty wine of Amphoras; and, bright

And clear, the blood that flows from trivial scars;

But with the bitter ink of mine own heart

I have not written and I must not write,

Let rust and acid dim the eternal stars.

105

Versailles.

“Le monde est l’œuvre d’un grand Architecte qui est mort avant de l’avoir achevé.”

B. CONSTANT.

The king is dead who planned these terraces;

The turf has grown to meadow-grass again;

The lake is rank beneath the untended trees,

And down the mouldering statues drips the rain.

The king is dead. Ay, he, with all his kind,

Is absolutely vanished, lost, and gone,

And not a trace of him remains behind;

But the forsaken palace lingers on.

How desolate! The weary waters drowned

In mist, the empty alleys chill and frore,

The vast and melancholy pleasure-ground

Where the forgotten monarch comes no more.

How like an older Folly, planned no less

For beauty, where a greater monarch trod,

And now, grown old, in its extreme distress

Abandoned by the long-departed God!

Oct. 1888.

106

Melancholia.

(For an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.)

So many years I toiled like Caliban

To fetch the stones and earth to build my fane;

So many years I thought before the brain

Reluctant would divulge the final plan.

Years upon years to forge the invented tools

Novel, as all my temple should be new;

Years upon years to fashion and to hew

The stones that should astound a world of fools.

Now shall I build? Cui bono?—lo, the salt

Hath lost its savour and I have no will:

What reck I now of gate or dome or vault?

Among the ruins of the thing undone

I sit and ask myself Cui bono? till

The sun sets, and a bat flies past the sun.

107

Under the Trees.

I lay full length near lonely trees

Heart-full of sighing silences;

So far as eyes could see all round

There was no life, no stir, no sound.

I thought no more down in the grass

Of all that must be or that was;

My weary brain forgot to ache,

My heart was still and did not break.

So close I lay to earth’s large breast

I could have dreamed myself at rest;

Only that then the grass must be

Above instead of under me.

Wherefore, I thought, should I regain

My anxious life that is so vain?

Here will I lie, forgetting strife,

Till death shall end this death-in-life.

108Ah, no: because, O coward will,

Thy destined work thou must fulfil,

Because no soul, be it great or small,

Can rise alone or lonely fall.

Therefore the old war must not cease,

The hard old inner war of peace,

With heart and body and mind and soul

Each striving for a different goal.

Therefore I will arise and bear

The burden all men everywhere

Have borne and must bear, and bear yet,

Till the end come when we forget.

109

Fire-flies.

I.

To-night I watch the fire-flies rise

And shine along the air;

They float beneath the starry skies,

As mystical and fair,

Over the hedge where dimly glows

The deep gold of the Persian rose.

I watch the fire-flies drift and float

Each is a dreamy flame,

Star-coloured each, a starry mote,

Like stars not all the same;

But whiter some, or faintly green,

Or wannest blue was ever seen.

They cross and cross and disappear,

And then again they glow;

Still drifting faintly there and here,

Still crossing to and fro,

As though in all their wandering

They wove a wide and shining thing.

%center%II.

110O fire-flies, would I knew the weft

You have the weaving of!

For, as I watch you move, bereft

Of thought or will or love,

I fear, O listless flames, you weave

The fates of men who strive and grieve.

The web of life, the weft of dreams,

You weave it ceaselessly;

A strange and filmy thing it seems,

And made in mystery

Of wind and darkness threaded through

With light these heavens never knew.

O pale, mysterious, wandering fire,

Born of the earth, alive

With the same breath that I respire,

Who know and think and strive;

You circle round me, stranger far

Than any charm of any star!

%center%III.

Ah me, as faint as you, as slight,

As hopelessly remote

As you, who still across the night

111Innumerably float,

Intangible as you, I see

The motives of our destiny.

For ah, no angel of the stars,

No guardian of the soul,

Stoops down beyond the heavenly bars

Our courses to control.

But filled and nourished with our breath

Are the dim hands that weave our death.

They weave with many threads our souls,

A subtle-tinted thing,

So interwoven that none controls

His own imagining;

For every strand with other strands

They twine and bind with viewless hands.

They weave the future of the past;

Their mystic web is wrought

With dreams from which we woke at last,

And many a secret thought;

For still they weave, howe’er we strive,

The web new-woven for none alive.

%center%IV.

112And still the fire-flies come and go—

Each is a dreamy flame—

Still palely drifting to and fro

The very way they came—

As though, across the dark they wove

Fate and the shining web thereof.

Yet, even were I sure of it,

I would not lift a hand

To break the threads that shine and flit—

For, ah, I understand:

Ruin, indeed, I well might leave;

But a new web could never weave.

113

Spring.

Spring, the tender maiden,

Like a girl who greets her lover,

Comes, her apron laden

Deep with flower and leaf we liked of old;

Not a sprig forgetting

That we then demanded of her;

Changing not nor setting

Out of place the tiniest frill or fold.

See, the aspen still is

Hung awry to droop and falter;

Still the leaves of lilies

Lift aloft their tall and tender sheath.

Wiser than the sages,

Spring would never dare to alter

What so many ages

Showed already right in bloom and wreath.

114Ah, could Spring remember

Every thrill and fancy perished

In the soul’s December;

Lost for ever, faded from the truth!

Holy things and tender,

Dead, alas! however cherished.

Breathe, O Spring, and render

That forgotten radiance of our youth!

115

Sacrifice.

O patient-eyed and tender saint,

Too far from thee I stand,

With vain desires perplexed and faint;

Reach out thy helping hand.

No fire is on the holy hill,

No voice on Sinai now;

But, in our gloom and darkness still

Abiding, help me thou.

They move on whom thy light is shed

Through lives of larger scope;

For them beneath the false and dead

There stirs a quickening hope.

So on some gusty morn we mark

The reddening tops of trees,

And hear in carols of the lark

Thespesian promises.

116

Writing History.

The profit of my living long ago

I dedicated to the unloving dead,

Though all my service they shall never know

Whose world is vanished and their name unsaid.

For none remembers now the good, the ill

They did, the deeds they thought should last for aye:

But in the little room my voice can fill

They shall not be forgotten till I die.

So, in a lonely churchyard by the shore,

The sea winds drift the sand across the mounds

And those forgotten graves are found no more,

And no man knows the churchyard’s holy bounds;

Till one come by and stoop with reverent hands

To clear the graves of their encumbering sands.

117

The Alembic.

In this alembic have I cast my youth,

For here I do believe if anywhere,

Here where the fires of death burn all things bare

I may distil the eternal gold of Truth.

Therefore the future is an empty name,

And life to me a dream that will not last,

And all my care is only for the Past,

Veiled with the veil of no man’s ruth or shame.

Yea, Death, that hast the secret Life withholds,

Thy meek and patient servitor am I;

And from thine alchemy I will not cease

Until I find amid thine essences,

Writ in a little sand of divers golds,

The answer to the eternal How and Why.

118

The Wall.

The sun falls through the olive-trees

And shines upon the wall below,

And lights the wall which cannot know

The Sunlight that it never sees.

I lie and dream; the Eternal Mind

Rains down on me and fills me full

With secrets high and wonderful;

And still my soul is deaf and blind.

119

The Idea.

Beneath this world of stars and flowers

That rolls in visible deity,

I dream another world is ours

And is the soul of all we see.

It hath no form, it hath no spirit;

It is perchance the Eternal Mind;

Beyond the sense that we inherit

I feel it dim and undefined.

How far below the depth of being,

How wide beyond the starry bound

It rolls unconscious and unseeing,

And is as Number or as Sound.

And through the vast fantastic visions

Of all this actual universe,

It moves unswerved by our decisions,

And is the play that we rehearse.

120

The Ideal.

The night is dark and warm and very still,

Only the moon goes pallid and alone;

The moon and I the whole wide heavens fill,

And all the earth lies little, lost, unknown.

I walk along the byways of my Soul,

Beyond the streets where all the world may go,

Until at last I reach the hidden goal

Built up in strength where only I may know.

For in my Soul a temple have I made,

Set on a height, divine and steep and far,

Nor often may I hope those floors to tread,

Or reach the gates that glimmer like a star.

O secret, inner shining of my dream,

How clear Thou risest on my soul to-night!

Forth will I fare and seek the heavenly beam,

And stand within the precincts of the light.

121And I will press beyond the curtain’d door,

And up the empty aisle where no one sings;

There will I fall before thee and adore,

And feel the shadowy winnowing of thy wings.

So will I reach thee, Spirit; for I have known

Thy voice, and looked upon thy blinding eyes;

And well thou knowest the world to me is grown

One dimness whence thy dreamy beacons rise.

Nor ask I any hope nor any end,

That thus for thee I dream all day, all night;

But, like the moon along the skies, I wend,

Knowing no world below my borrowed light.

122

God in a Heart.

I.

Once, where the unentered Temple stood, at noon

No sun-ray pierced the dim unwindowed aisle;

And all the flooding whiteness of the moon

Could only bathe the outer peristyle.

And as we passed we praised the Temple front;

But one went in; with careless feet he trod

The long-forgotten pavement moss’d and blunt

And found the altar of the unprayed-to God.

He reached and lit the tapers of the shrine

And let their radiance flood the vault obscure;

But ah! upon what evil things to shine,

Blind, crawling, chill, discoloured, and impure.

And as the Light burns clearer through the gloom,

More foul, more deathly, shows the illumined room.

%center%II.

123O light of God, lit in the heart of man,

More welcome than the well in desert sands,

We bless thee fallen hither for a span

To glorify the Temple made with hands.

We did not deem how foul the Temple was,

Until thou visitedst the untended shrine;

Thy glory is not peace for us, alas,

Illumination tragic and divine.

Yet unrelenting pour, revealing Light!

Scare and annihilate all our blind desires,

Shine through our thoughts, and purify the night,

And burn us clean with thy transcendent fires,

Until thou leavest us renewed and whole

Thy mortal Temple of the transient Soul.

124

Calais Beacon.

(To E. S.)

For long before we came upon the coast and the line of the surge,

Pale on the uttermost verge,

We saw the great white rays that lay along the air on high

Between us and the sky.

So soft they lay, so pure and still: “Those are the ways,” you said,

“Only the angels tread;”

And long we watched them tremble past the hurrying rush of the train

Over the starlit plain.

Until at last we saw the strange, pallid, electrical star

Burning wanly afar:

The lighthouse beacon sending out its rays on either hand,

Over the sea and the land.

125Those pale and filmy rays that reach to mariners, lost in the night,

A hope of dawn and a light—

How soft and vague they lie along the darkness shrouding o’er

The dim sea and the shore.

And many fall in vain across the untenanted marshes to die,

And few where sailors cry;

Yet, though the moon go out in clouds, and all of the stars grow wan,

Their pale light shineth on.

O souls, that save a world by night, ye too are no rays of the noon,

And no inconstant moon;

But such pale, tender-shining things as yon faint beacon afar,

Whiter than any star.

No planet names that all may tell, no meteor radiance and glow,

For a wondering world to know.

You shine as pale and soft as that, you pierce the stormy night,

And know not of your light!

126

The Mushrooms of the Mine.

Deep in the mines of the North, in the centre of desolate Sweden,

More than a mile underground, winter has never an end—

Lo, not a rift in the granite mass of the mountain where ever

Ray or dew of the morn, dream of the moon, may descend.

Up in the hills overhead the spring and the summer are mingled;

Lilacs heavy with blossom o’ershadow the ripening corn.

How should the hollow heart of the mountain thrill with the shiver

Rippling swift in the leaves when the first of the roses is born?

127Six months long, overhead, the bright white sun of the Vikings

Glitters clear and immense, seven-rayed as a star.

Cold and clear as a star of steel—see, it pierces the midnight;

Crystal, undazzling, eterne.... Ay, but the mine is too far!

Yet in the depth of the mine where the day and the night never enter,

Lo! in the mine there is light, and lo! there are flowers in the mine!

Woven of dew and of moonlight, blooming in pale phosphorescence,

Moon-blue, rose as the levin, green as the marish-shine.

Hanging aloft from the roof of the wonderful flower-lighted caverns,

Shedding hither and thither their flakes of the milkiest flame.

Light that is not of the earth and not of the heavens exhaling:

These are the stars of the miners; out of the darkness they came.

128Mushrooms of the mine—no more—that the sun never visits,

Born of the ooze and the damp, bred in the slime and the cold,

Scentless and petalless blossoms, made without pleasure and hidden:

See, how they shed in the darkness the light they shall never behold!

1890.

129

An Orchard at Avignon.

The hills are white, but not with snow:

They are as pale in summer time,

For herb or grass may never grow

Upon their slopes of lime.

Within the circle of the hills

A ring, all flowering in a round,

An orchard-ring of almond fills

The plot of stony ground.

More fair than happier trees, I think,

Grown in well-watered pasture land,

These parched and stunted branches, pink

Above the stones and sand.

O white, austere, ideal place,

Where very few will care to come,

Where spring hath lost the waving grace

She wears for us at home!

130Fain would I sit and watch for hours

The holy whiteness of thy hills,

Their wreath of pale auroral flowers,

Their peace the silence fills.

A place of secret peace thou art,

Such peace as in an hour of pain

One moment fills the amazed heart,

And never comes again.

131

Twilight.

When I was young the twilight seemed too long.

How often on the western window seat

I leaned my book against the misty pane

And spelled the last enchanting lines again,

The while my mother hummed an ancient song,

Or sighed a little and said: “The hour is sweet!”

When I, rebellious, clamoured for the light.

But now I love the soft approach of night,

And now with folded hands I sit and dream

While all too fleet the hours of twilight seem;

And thus I know that I am growing old.

O granaries of Age! O manifold

And royal harvest of the common years!

There are in all thy treasure-house no ways

But lead by soft descent and gradual slope

To memories more exquisite than Hope.

Thine is the Iris born of olden tears,

132And thrice more happy are the happy days

That live divinely in thy lingering rays.

So autumn roses bear a lovelier flower;

So in the emerald after-sunset hour

The orchard wall and trembling aspen trees

Appear an infinite Hesperides.

Ay, as at dusk we sit with folded hands,

Who knows, who cares in what enchanted lands

We wander while the undying memories throng?

When I was young the twilight seemed too long.

1889.

133

Darwinism.

When first the unflowering Fern forest

Shadowed the dim lagoons of old,

A vague, unconscious, long unrest

Swayed the great fronds of green and gold.

Until the flexible stem grew rude,

The fronds began to branch and bower,

And lo! upon the unblossoming wood

There breaks a dawn of apple-flower.

Then on the fruitful forest-boughs

For ages long the unquiet ape

Swung happy in his airy house

And plucked the apple, and sucked the grape.

Until at length in him there stirred

The old, unchanged, remote distress,

That pierced his world of wind and bird

With some divine unhappiness.

134Not love, nor the wild fruits he sought,

Nor the fierce battles of his clan

Could still the unborn and aching thought

Until the brute became the man.

Long since.... And now the same unrest

Goads to the same invisible goal,

Till some new gift, undreamed, unguessed

End the new travail of the soul.

135

Antiphon to the Holy Spirit.

Men and Women sing.

Men.

O Thou that movest all, O Power

That bringest life where’er Thou art,

O Breath of God in star and flower,

Mysterious aim of soul and heart;

Within the thought that cannot grasp Thee

In its unfathomable hold,

We worship Thee who may not clasp Thee,

O God, unreckoned and untold!

%center%Women.

O Source and Sea of Love, O Spirit

That makest every soul akin,

O Comforter whom we inherit,

We turn and worship Thee within!

To give beyond all dreams of giving,

To lose ourselves as Thou in us,

We long; for Thou, O Fount of living,

Art lost in Thy creation thus!

%center%Men.

136The mass of unborn matter knew Thee,

And lo! the splendid, silent sun

Sprang out to be a witness to Thee

Who art the All, who art the One;

The airy plants unseen that flourish

Their floating strands of filmy rose,

Too small for sight, are Thine to nourish;

For Thou art all that breathes and grows.

%center%Women.

Thou art the ripening of the fallows,

The swelling of the buds in rain;

Thou art the joy of birth that hallows

The rending of the flesh in twain;

O Life, O Love, how undivided

Thou broodest o’er this world of Thine,

Obscure and strange, yet surely guided

To reach a distant end divine!

%center%Men.

We know Thee in the doubt and terror

That reels before the world we see;

We knew Thee in the faiths of error;

We know Thee most who most are free.

137This phantom of the world around Thee

Is vast, divine, but not the whole:

We worship Thee, and we have found Thee

In all that satisfies the soul!

%center%Men and Women.

How shall we serve, how shall we own Thee,

O breath of Love and Life and Thought?

How shall we praise, who are not shown Thee?

How shall we serve, who are as nought?

Ah, though Thy worlds maintain unbroken

The silence of their awful round,

A voice within our souls hath spoken,

And we who seek have more than found.

139

Epilogue.

In the cup of life, ’tis true,

Dwells a draught of bitter dew—

Disenchantment, sorrow, pain,

Hunger that no bread can still,

Dreary dawns that dawn in vain,

Hopes that torture, joys that kill.

Yet no other cup I know

Where such radiant waters glow:

It contains the song of birds,

And the shining of the sun;

And the sweet unspoken words

We have dreamed of, every one;

Love of women, minds of men.—

—Take the cup, nor break it, then.

The Gresham Press,

UNWIN BROTHERS,

CHILWORTH AND LONDON.

IN SAME SERIES.

THE LADY FROM THE SEA.

By Henrik Isben.

A LONDON PLANE TREE.

By Amy Levy.

WORDSWORTH’S GRAVE.

By William Watson.

IPHIGENIA IN DELPHI.

By Richard Garnett.

MIRÈIO.

By Frederic Mistral.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.