DOVER BEACH

THE sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits ;-on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of

spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

GROWING OLD

WHAT is it to grow old?

Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?

Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath?
-Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength

Not our bloom only, but our strength-decay? Is it to feel each limb

Grow stiffer, every function less exact,

Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not,

Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dream'd 'twould be! 'Tis not to have our life

Mellow'd and soften'd as with sunset-glow,

A golden day's decline.

'Tis not to see the world

As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirr'd;

And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The
years that are no more.

It is to spend long days

And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured

In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,

And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart

Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion-none.

It is last stage of all—

When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

THE PROGRESS OF POESY

A VARIATION

YOUTH rambles on life's arid mount, And strikes the rock, and finds the vein, And brings the water from the fount, The fount which shall not flow again.

The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanish'd out of hand.

And then the old man totters nigh,
And feebly rakes among the stones.
The mount is mute, the channel dry;
And down he lays his weary bones.