How sweet, unreach'd by earthly jars, My sister! to behold with thee

The hush among the shining stars,

The calm upon the moonlit sea!

How sweet to feel, on the boon air, All our unquiet pulses cease!

To feel that nothing can impair

The gentleness, the thirst for peace—

The gentleness too rudely hurl'd
On this wild earth of hate and fear;
The thirst for peace a raving world
Would never let us satiate here.

5. Absence.

N this fair stranger's eyes of grey

IN

Thine eyes, my love! I see.

I shudder! for the passing day

Had borne me far from thee.

This is the curse of life! that not

A nobler, calmer train

Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot

Our passions from our brain;

But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,

And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.

I struggle towards the light; and ye, Once-long'd-for storms of love!

If with the light ye cannot be,

I bear that ye remove.

I struggle towards the light-but oh, While yet the night is chill,

Upon time's barren, stormy flow,

Stay with me, Marguerite, still!

E were apart! yet, day by day,

WE

I bade my heart more constant be;

I bade it keep the world away,

And grow a home for only thee;

Nor fear'd but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day more tried, more true.

The fault was grave! I might have known,
What far too soon, alas, I learn'd—
The heart can bind itself alone,

And faith is often unreturn'd.

Self-sway'd our feelings ebb and swell!

Thou lov'st no more;-Farewell! Farewell!

Farewell!-and thou, thou lonely heart,

Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart

From thy remote and spheréd course

To haunt the place where passions reignBack to thy solitude again!

Back! with the conscious thrill of shame

Which Luna felt, that summer night,

Flash through her pure immortal frame,
When she forsook the starry height
To hang over Endymion's sleep
Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep-

Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved
How vain a thing is mortal love,
Wandering in Heaven, far removed;
But thou hast long had place to prove
This truth-to prove, and make thine own:
'Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone!'

Or, if not quite alone, yet they

Which touch thee are unmating things-
Ocean and clouds and night and day;
Lorn autumns and triumphant springs;

And life, and others' joy and pain,
And love, if love, of happier men.