XXXI.

But I need, now as then,

Thee, God, who moldest men;

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I-to the wheel of life

With shapes and colors rife,

Bound dizzily-mistake my end, to slake Thy

thirst:

XXXII.

So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the

same!

EPILOGUE

(From Asolando, 1890)

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free,

Will they pass to where-by death, fools think, imprisoned

Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you
loved so,
---Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do

With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless did I drivel -Being-who?

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,

"Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed,-fight on, fare

ever

There as here!"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

1809-1861

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

(From Poems, 1844)

I.

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river.

II.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:

The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

III.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

IV.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan
(How tall it stood in the river!),
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.

V.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan (Laughed while he sat by the river),

"The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed." Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river.

VI.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

VII.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,-
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

SONNETS

CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON

I think we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope

Of yon grey blank of sky, we might grow faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint

Round our aspirant souls; but since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop,
For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted
And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God."

THE PROSPECT

Methinks we do as fretful children do,

Leaning their faces on the window-pane

To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain,

And shut the sky and landscape from their view:
And thus, alas, since God the maker drew
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain,
The life beyond us, and our souls in pain,

We miss the prospect which we are called unto By grief we are fools to use. Be still and strong, O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath, And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong

That so, as life's appointment issueth,

Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.

WORK

What are we set on earth for? Say, to toil;
Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines
For all the heat o' the day, till it declines,
And Death's mild curfew shall from work assoil.
God did anoint thee with His odorous oil,
To wrestle, not to reign; and He assigns
All thy tears over, like pure crystallines,
For younger fellow-workers of the soil
To wear for amulets. So others shall
Take patience, labour, to their heart and hand,
From thy hand and thy heart and thy brave cheer,
And God's grace fructify through thee to all.
The least flower, with a brimming cup may stand,
And share its dew-drop with another near.

(From Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850)

I.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,