FIVE SONNETS.

CHIEFLY SUGGESTED BY ST. AUGUSTINE.

I.

WHAT love I when I love Thee, O my God?
Not corporal beauty, nor the limb of snow,
Nor of loved light the white and pleasant flow,
Nor manna showers, nor streams that flow abroad,
Nor flowers of Heaven, nor small stars of the sod:
Not these, my God, I love, who love Thee so;
Yet love I something better than I know :-

A certain light on a more golden road;

A sweetness, not of honey or the hive;

A beauty, not of summer or the spring;
A scent, a music, and a blossoming
Eternal, timeless, placeless, without gyve,

Fair, fadeless, undiminish'd, ever dim,-
This, this is what I love in loving Him.

II.

This, this is what I love, and what is this?

:

I ask'd the beautiful earth, who said—" not I." I ask'd the depths, and the immaculate sky And all the spaces said-"not He but His." And so, like one who scales a precipice,

Height after height, I scaled the flaming ball
Of the great universe, yea, pass'd o'er all
The world of thought, which so much higher is.
Then I exclaimed. "To whom is mute all murmur
Of phantasy, of nature, and of art,

He, than articulate language hears a firmer
And grander meaning in his own deep heart.
No sound from cloud or angel." Oh, to win
That voiceless voice-"My servant, enter in "!

III.

MEMORY.

IDEAS FADING IN THE MEMORY.

QUICKLY they vanish to a land unlit,

Things for which no man cares to smile or mourn, Forgotten in the place where they were born; Each hath a marvellous history unwrit,

A fathomless river floweth over it.

Quickly they fade, with no more traces worn
Than shadows flying over fields of corn
Wear, as in soft processional they flit.
The thought (much like the children of our youth)
Doth often die before us, and presents

The very semblance of the monuments
To which we are approaching aye in sooth,
Where, though the brass and marble do not waste,
The tints are faded, and the line effaced.*

* See Locke," On the Human Understanding," book ii., chap. x., §§ 4, 5.

R

IV.

REVIVAL OF MEMORY.

Sadly, O sage, thine images are told.
Think we of cornfields, where again there fall,
At Memory's touch that is so magical,
All the long lights that ever rippled gold
Across their surface, all the manifold

Wavelets of tremulous shadow; and withal
Through doors and windows of a haunted hall,
Those buried children of the days of old,
Those evanescent children of dead years,
Clouded or glorious, glide into the room,
Sudden as yellow leaves drop from the tree;
And all the moulder'd imagery reappears,
And all the letter'd lines are fair to see,
And all the legend lives above the tomb.

V.

MARVELS OF MEMORY.

Strange dying, resurrection stranger yet!
In the deep chamber, Memory, let me dwell,
Folded in a recess ineffable.

Lo! in that silent chamber sometimes set,
I music hear, and breath of violet

(Though flowers be none within a mile to smell) From breath of lily I can finely tell,

And I with joy remember my regret,
And I, regretful, think how glad I was.
O men who roam to see world-famous tracts,
Immaculate skies, or from the mountain-pass
The great white wonder of the cataracts,
Visits to many a lovely land ye weave
In looms of fancy-but yourselves ye leave.*
* St. Augustine, "Confess.," lib. x., 12, 13, 14.

ST. JOHN AT PATMOS.

I.

WHAT be his dreams in Patmos?

O'er the seas

very fall

Looks he toward Athens, where the Of Grecian sunlight is Platonical? Or, peradventure, towards the Cyclades, The Delian earth-star, ray'd with laurel-treesFrom ribbon'd baskets where Demeter threw Flowers the colour of the country blue Oat-garlanded in Paros-or where bees Humming o'er Amalthea, who fed Zeus

With goat-milk, goldenly the forest starr'd While rosy purple apples, full of juice,

Laugh'd in the grassy horn-where, Naxosward,

Flush'd Dyonysus, driven o'er the brine,
Ivied the mast, and cream'd the crimson wine.

II.

Not fancies of the soft Ionian clime,

Nor thoughts on Plato's page, that greener grow

Than do the plane-trees by the pleasant flow

Of the Ilissus in the summer time,

Came to the Galilean with sweet chime.

Blanch'd in the blaze of Syrian summers lo!
He gazes on Gennesareth, aglow

Within its golden mountain cup sublime.
The sunset comes. Behind the Roman tower
The dark boat's circled topsails shift and swell,
The tunick'd boatmen dip their nets an hour,
And the sun goeth down on Jezreel.

Quench'd is the flickering furnace of the dust,
The mountains branded as with red gold dust.

III.

But ere heaven's cressets burn along its plain,
The Master comes. And as a man, all night
Lull'd in a room full fronting ocean's might,
First waking sees a whiteness on his pane,
A little dawning whiteness, then again
A little line insufferably bright

Edging the ripples, orbing on outright
Until the glory he may scarce sustain ;
And as a mighty city far-off kenn'd,

Although the same, from each new height and glen Looks strangely different to the merchantmen Who in long files towards its ramparts wend ; — So to St. John's deep meditative eye, That Nature grew to God's own majesty.