Soft scents eternal, love's undying dews.

And He who bore the man's heart from earth's wave To Heaven's calm shore that He might sweetly save, Cannot but pity as our wail renews.

Fragrant eternally were the eternal rose,
Eternal were compassion for the child,
Eternal are our sorrows in His sight;
And everlastingly compassion flows
From Him who bears Humanity undefiled,
For the infinite pathos pity infinite.

III.

Prayer is not eloquence nor measured tone
Nor memory musical of periods fair.

*

The son forlorn forgetteth half his prayer.
Faith sighs its prayers, or weeps them with long moan,
With tears that have a grammar of their own.

Babes have no words, but only weep or e'er
The mother reads the little hunger there.
Faith looks its prayers. Behold, before the throne
There be full many love-looks of the saints;

And David's upward glance from the earth's snow
To God's long spring, three thousand years ago,
Is mark'd in Heaven's best hymn-book of complaints.
Ah! the best prayers that faith may ever think
Are untranslatable by pen and ink.

*Luke xv. 18, 19, compared with ver. 21.

† Psalm v. 3.

THE PRINCESS ALICE.

I.

CHILD, with the soft hymn by a father's bed
Sung soothing; maiden, whose bright face did stir
All our rough England with the love of her,
For the dear help she gave the aching head
Of our good Queen-beyond all sung or said
Of fair adventure and of golden skies

The morning dawn'd for those delighted eyes ;—
Woman most happy, most serenely wed!

Is there aught better, aught that angels care
To look on more intensely as they pass
In their ascension to the sea of glass,

Than lives thus delicate, thus supremely fair:
In double coronation, double state,

Twice beautified-twice crown'd by birth and fate?

II.

Sweet watcher by the wounded,—undefiled
Pitier, in whom earth's fallen might behold
The crystal's purity without its cold,—
Pale passionate weeper o'er a princely child,—
Thoughtful and thorough learner of the mild

But difficult lesson Charity can unfold,Calm honest thinker, gently overbold, Who for a little trod the glacial road

Of doubt, but found it more than doubly sweet After the silence of the awful space,

After the absence of Christ's living face, To clasp with her cut hands the bleeding feet. More beauty than in beauty's self may be In thought-won faith and grief, as angels see.

III.

The brightness and the shadow finely blent,
The beauty and the sorrow, all the twin
Delight and desolation have pass'd in
Behind the veil; and our Princess present,
Not with the white face of a monument,

But with a wondrous look of vanish'd sin,
And such serenity as only win

Souls that have fought their way to full content.
So be she seen by love that ne'er forgets,
Pathetic with such pathos as God wills-
But a fair influence soothing all regrets,
A presence on the happy Highland hills,
A memory like the breath of violets

In letters from a land that sunshine fills.

1879.

TWO SONNETS FROM THE OLD

TESTAMENT.

I.

"Hold not Thy peace at my tears."

WHAT is the saddest sweetest lowest sound
Nearest akin to perfect silence? Not

The delicate whisper sometimes in the hot
Autumnal morning heard the cornfields round;
Nor yet to lonely man, now almost bound

By slumber, near his house a murmuring river Buzzing and droning o'er the stones for ever. Not such faint voice of Autumn oat-encrown'd, And not such liquid murmur, O my heart!

But tears that drop o'er graves, and sins, and fears, A sound the very weeper scarcely hears, A music in which silence hath some part. O Thou, all gentle, who all-hearing art,

Hold not thy peace, sweet Saviour, at my tears.

II.

"And the coast descended unto the river Kanah (brook of reeds), southwards." (Joshua xvii. 9.)

THE Coast descended to the brook of reeds,
The river Kanah, southward. In the stream
The armour of Manasseh used to gleam,
Marching right up to do those daring deeds
Upon the Canaanite. Wave to wave succeeds,
O ancient river, age succeeds to age.
I ask thee nothing of the battle's rage,
Or how the hewing of the forest speeds
In the land of giants. Only I would know,

Do those old reeds within thy channel quiver,
Making a music when the breezes blow?

And do their mottled lances slant as ever?

Do they outlive man's strength—God's weakest things,
Of older race than all our lives of kings?