AND therefore, if to love can be desert,
As these you see, and trembling knees that fail To bear the burden of a heavy heart,
This weary minstrel-life that once was girt To climb Aornus, and can scarce avail To pipe now 'gainst the woodland nightingale A melancholy music?- why advert To these things? O beloved, it is plain I am not of thy worth nor for thy place; And yet because I love thee, I obtain From that same love this vindicating grace, To live on still in love and yet in vain ; To bless thee, yet renounce thee to thy face.
INDEED this very love which is my boast, And which, when rising up from breast to brow, Doth crown me with a ruby large enow
To draw men's eyes, and prove the inner cost, — This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,
I should not love withal, unless that thou Hadst set me an example, shown me how,
When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed, And love called love. And thus, I cannot speak Of love even, as a good thing of my own.
Thy soul hath snatched up mine, all faint and weak, And placed it by thee on a golden throne; And that I love (O soul, I must be meek!), Is by thee only, whom I love alone.
AND wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough, And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough Between our faces, to cast light on each?
I drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach
My hand to hold thy spirit so far off
From myself - me -that I should bring thee proof, In words, of love hid in me out of reach. Nay, let the silence of my womanhood Commend my woman-love to thy belief, - Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed, And rend the garment of my life, in brief, By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude, Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.
SWEET Mavis ! at this cool delicious hour Of gloaming, when a pensive quietness Hushes the odorous air, with what a power Of impulse unsubdued, thou dost express Thyself a spirit! While the silver dew Holy as manna on the meadow falls, Thy song's impassioned clarity, trembling through This omnipresent stillness, disenthralls
The soul to adoration. First I heard
A low, thick, lubric gurgle, soft as love, Yet sad as memory, through the silence poured Like starlight. But the mood intenser grows, Precipitate rapture quickens, move on move Lucidly linked together, till the close.
O DEEP unlovely brooklet, moaning slow Through moorish fen in utter loneliness! The partridge cowers beside thy loamy flow In pulseful tremor, when with sudden press The huntsman fluskers through the rustled heather. In March thy sallow buds from vermeil shells Break satin-tinted, downy as the feather
Of moss-chat that among the purplish bells Breasts into fresh new life her three unborn.
The plover hovers o'er thee, uttering clear And mournful-strange his human cry forlorn. While wearily, alone, and void of cheer Thou guid'st thy nameless waters from the fen, To sleep unsunned in an untrampled glen.
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