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CCXXXV.

SUMMER GLOAMING.

It is a Summer's gloaming, faint and sweet,
A gloaming brightened by an infant moon
Fraught with the fairest light of middle June ;
The garden path rings hard beneath my feet,
And hark, O hear I not the gentle dews
Fretting the gentle forest in his sleep?
Or does the stir of housing insects creep
Thus faintly on mine ear? day's many hues
Waned with the paling light and are no more,
And none but drowsy pinions beat the air-
The bat is circling softly by my door,
And silent as the snow-flake leaves his lair,
In the dark twilight flitting here and there
Wheeling the self-same circuit o'er and o'er.

CCXXXVI.

"FROM NIGHT TO NIGHT."

FROM night to night, through circling darkness whirled,
Day dawns, and wanes, and still leaves, as before
The shifting tides and the eternal shore:
Sources of life, and forces of the world,
Unseen, unknown, in folds of mystery furled,

Unseen, unknown, remain for evermore :

To heaven-hid heights man's questioning soul would

soar,

Yet falls from darkness unto darkness hurled !

Angels of light, ye spirits of the air,

Peopling of yore the dreamland of our youth,
Ye who once led us through these scenes so fair,
Lead now, and leave us near the realm of Truth:
Lo, if in dreams some truths we chanced to see,
Now in the truth some dreams may haply be.

CCXXXVII.

THE AFTERMATH.

It was late summer, and the grass again

Had grown knee-deep,-we stood, my love and I,
Awhile in silence where the stream runs by;
Idly we listened to a plaintive strain,—

A young maid singing to her youthful swain, -
Ah me, dead days remembered make us sigh,
And tears will sometimes flow we know not why;
If spring be past, I said, shall love remain?

She moved aside, yet soon she answered me,
Turning her gaze responsive to mine own,-
Spring days are gone, and yet the grass, we see
Unto a goodly height again hath grown;
Dear love, just so love's aftermath may be

A richer growth than e'er spring-days have known.

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IDLE although our homage be and vain,
Who loudly through the door of silence press
And vie in zeal to crown death's nakedness,
Not therefore shall melodious lips refrain
Thy praises, gentlest warrior without stain,
Denied the happy garland of success,

Foil'd by dark fate, but glorious none the less,
Greatest of losers, on the lone peak slain
Of Alp-like virtue. Not to-day, and not
To-morrow shall thy spirit's splendour be
Oblivion's victim; but when God shall find
All human grandeur among men forgot,
Then only shall the world, grown old and blind,
Cease, in her dotage, to remember Thee.

CCXXXIX,

GORDON.

II.

ARAB, Egyptian, English-by the sword
Cloven, or pierced with spears, or bullet-mown-
In equal fate they sleep: their dust is grown
A portion of the fiery sands abhorred.

And thou, what hast thou, hero, for reward,

Thou, England's glory and her shame? O'erthrown
Thou liest, unburied, or with grave unknown

As his to whom on Nebo's height the Lord
Showed all the land of Gilead, unto Dan;
Judah sea-fringed; Manasseh and Ephraim;
And Jericho palmy, to where Zoar lay;
And in a valley of Moab buried him,
Over against Beth-Peor, but no man
Knows of his sepulchre until this day.

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