Nor for men's reverence hadst thou need to wear Nor were it fit that aught of thee grew old, And hear we not thy words of molten gold Whereat men warmed their spirits? Nay, for all The lovely laughter, the clear tears, the call The love that caught strange light from death's own eyes, And that great night of love more strange than this, Veiled loves that shifted shapes and shafts, and gave, All joys and wonders of old lives and new And all the grief whereof he dreams and grieves, All these through thee our spirit of sense perceives, Birds caught and snared that fill our ears with thee, Bay-blossoms in thy wreath of brow-bound leaves. Mixed with the masque of death's old comedy Blue lotus-blooms and white and rosy-red A FORSAKEN GARDEN. In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses The steep square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead. The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand? The dense hard passage is blind and stifled The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; The rocks are left when he wastes the plain. The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, These remain. Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not; As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry; From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not, Could she call, there were never a rose to reply. Over the meadows that blossom and wither Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song; The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels In a round where life seems barren as death. Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping Years ago. Heart handfast in heart as they stood, 'Look thither,' Did he whisper? 'Look forth from the flowers to the sea; For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither, And men that love lightly may die — but we?' And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened, And or ever the garden's last petals were shed, In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened, Love was dead. Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end- but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? They are loveless now as the grass above them All are at one now, roses and lovers, Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. Not a breath of the time that has been hovers In the air now soft with a summer to be. Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter We shall sleep. Here death may deal not again for ever; Here change may come not till all change end. Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Death lies dead. 9 MATHILDE BLIND. FROM THE PROPHECY OF ST. ORAN.' 18 'A CURSE is on this work!' Columba cried; 'A curse is on this work!' he cried again 'The Lord rebukes us in His wrath! I ask, Again his eagle glances swept each face, 'Was it indeed a judgment from on high?' |