CLXV.

MORE THAN TRUTH.

No longer do I know if thou art fair
Or if the truth my vision might disgrace,
Nor do I know if other men would care
To make their sweetest heaven of thy face,
But what to me the words that others speak,

Their thoughts, their laughter, or their foolish gaze?
For hast thou not a herald on my cheek
To tell the coming nearer of thy ways,

And in my veins a stranger blood that flows,
A bell that strikes on pulses of my heart,
Submissive life that proudly comes and goes
Through eyes that burn, and speechless lips that part?
And hast thou not a hidden life in mine,

In thee a soul which none may know for thine ?

CLXVI.

THE BODY FAIR.

THE empty marvel of a splendid cage
With fretted gold and twisted silver wire
Thy body seems, and mine a lover's rage
That gilds thy painted shows with rich desire.
And round the precious metal of the bars
Flowers scarlet-hearted, and pale passion-flowers,
And crowded jasmine mingle as the stars,
Dewy with scent of kisses, warm with showers.
Of marble, lily and pure snow, the floor;
The window stained with sunlit ruby shine;
Of azure water clear the sapphire door
That never turns on hinges crystalline :
The bird within is mute and does not sing,

And dull his tuneless throat, and clipt his wing.

CLXVII,

LOVE AND WEARINESS.

No idol thou for passion's eager will
To make a holy worship of thy name;

Not thine our praise; remembered not thy claim :
Thy shrine no temple on love's holy hill.
What rules thy life and soul, their wayward skill,
Has not the spell that masters rosy shame,
And tender pride and beauty like a flame
Desirous, one through starry good and ill.

No God with ministers of hope and fate, He came, but humbly at my heart's low gate There knocked a languid boy, a beggar maid; His limbs were wan: her tarnished golden dress Did match his faded hair. And this she said: "He is thy Love, and I am Weariness."

CLXVIII.

THE STUDENT'S CHAMBER.

STRANGE things pass nightly in this little room,
All dreary as it looks by light of day;
Enchantment reigns here when at evening play
Red firelit glimpses through the pallid gloom :
Then come perchance the shadows thrown assume
That guise-heroic guests in dim array,—
The Kings of eld, returned the human way
By Bridge of Dread, from star to straitening tomb.

High dreams they bring that never were dreamt in sleep:

These walls yawn wide to Time, to Death and Hell, To the last abyss of men's wild cries to Heaven; While night uncurtains on a sobbing deep, And lo! the land wherein the Holy Grail, In far Monsalvat, to the soul is given.

CLXIX,

THE LOST IDEAL OF THE WORLD.

A NOVICE in the School of Paradise,

I leant beside the Golden Gate one day:
Eternity's blue deeps before me lay
That girdle the Queen Island of the skies,
And soul-content was lit within mine eyes,
Calm with the calm that lists not of decay,-
A dreamy sense of dreams come true for aye,
And Darkness burnt up in a last Sunrise.

O God, what was She, there, without the Gate-Sad in such beauty Heav'n seemed incomplete ?

Drawn by a nameless star's young whisperings, With hands stretch'd forth as if to pass by Fate She drifted on-so near Thy mercy-seat

Blind, and in all the loneliness of wings!