Before this teased o'erlabour'd heart For ever leaves its vain employ, 2. Too Late. EACH on his own strict line we move, And sometimes, by still harder fate, The lovers meet, but meet too late. --Thy heart is mine!-True, true! ah, true! 3. Separation. STOP!-not to me, at this bitter departing, But, if the stedfast commandment of Nature Me let no half-effaced memories cumber! Fled, fled at once, be all vestige of thee! Deep be the darkness and still be the slumberDead be the past and its phantoms to me! Then, when we meet, and thy look strays toward me, Scanning my face and the changes wrought there: Who, let me say, is this stranger regards me, With the grey eyes, and the lovely brown hair? 4. On the Rhine. VAIN is the effort to forget. Some day I shall be cold, I know, Vain is the agony of grief. 'Tis true, indeed, an iron knot Ties straitly up from mine thy lot, And were it snapt-thou lov'st me not! Awhile let me with thought have done. So let me lie, and, calm as they, Let beam upon my inward view Those eyes of deep, soft, lucent hue- Ah, Quiet, all things feel thy balm! 5. Longing. COME to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again! For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day. P Come, as thou cam'st a thousand times, Or, as thou never cam'st in sooth, Come to me in my dreams, and then For then the night will more than pay DESPONDENCY. THE thoughts that rain their steady glow Which others know, or say they know- Thoughts light, like gleams, my spirit's sky, But they will not remain. They light me once, they hurry by; SELF-DECEPTION. SAY, what blinds us, that we claim the glory Of possessing powers not our share? -Since man woke on earth, he knows his story, But, before we woke on earth, we were. Long, long since, undower'd yet, our spirit Then, as now, this tremulous, eager being Ah, whose hand that day through Heaven guided Man's new spirit, since it was not we? Ah, who sway'd our choice, and who decided For, alas! he left us each retaining Still these waste us with their hopeless straining, Ah! and he, who placed our master-feeling, We but dream we have our wish'd-for powers, Ah! some power exists there, which is ours? 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! Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand, Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Egæan, and it brought 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 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, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, |