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,

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.

NEW ROME.

LINES WRITTEN FOR MISS STORY'S ALBUM.

THE armless Vatican Cupid

Hangs down his beautiful head;

For the priests have got him in prison,
And Psyche long has been dead.

But see, his shaven oppressors
Begin to quake and disband!
And The Times, that bright Apollo,
Proclaims salvation at hand.

"And what," cries Cupid, "will save us?" Says Apollo: "Modernise Rome!

What inns! Your streets, too, how narrow !

Too much of palace and dome!