AUSTERITY OF POETRY

THAT SON of Italy who tried to blow,*
Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song,
In his light youth amid a festal throng
Sate with his bride to see a public show.

Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow
Youth like a star; and what to youth belong-
Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong.
A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! lo,

'Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay! Shuddering, they drew her garments off—and found

A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.

Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,

Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.

A PICTURE AT NEWSTEAD

WHAT made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell?

'Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry Stormily sweet, his Titan-agony ;

It was the sight of that Lord Arundel

Who struck, in heat, his child he loved so well, And his child's reason flicker'd, and did die. Painted (he will'd it) in the gallery

They hang; the picture doth the story tell.

Behold the stern, mail'd father, staff in hand! The little fair-hair'd son, with vacant gaze, Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are!

Methinks the woe, which made that father stand
Baring his dumb remorse to future days,
Was woe than Byron's woe more tragic far.

RACHEL

I

IN Paris all look'd hot and like to fade.

Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries,

Sere with September, droop'd the chestnut-trees. 'Twas dawn; a brougham roll'd through the streets and made

Halt at the white and silent colonnade

Of the French Theatre.

Worn with disease,

Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,

Sate in the brougham and those blank walls survey'd.

She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled

To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;

Why stops she by this empty play-house drear?

Ah, where the spirit its highest life hath led,
All spots, match'd with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel's Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!

RACHEL

II

UNTO a lonely villa, in a dell
Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore,
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore
Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,
The rose-crown'd queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia, full on her death-bed.-'Twas well!

The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life's last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate's frowns,

Do for this radiant Greek-soul'd artist cease;
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.

RACHEL

III

SPRUNG from the blood of Israel's scatter'd race, At a mean inn in German Aarau born,

To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn, Trick'd out with a Parisian speech and face,

Imparting life renew'd, old classic grace;
Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place—

Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone She had one power, which made her breast its home!

In her, like us, there clash'd, contending powers,

Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours ; Her genius and her glory are her own.