Puslapio vaizdai
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Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

Still clutching the inviolable shade,

With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silvered branches of the glade –
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope

Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles, to the nightingales!

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.

Soon, soon thy cheer would die,

Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.

Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Ægean isles;

And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,

Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine And knew the intruders on his ancient home,

The young light-hearted masters of the waves
And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail,
And day and night held on indignantly
O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,

Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,

To where the Atlantic raves

Outside the western straits, and unbent sails

There where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;

And on the beach undid his corded bales.

DOVER BEACH.

THE sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits: -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

PHILOMELA.

HARK! ah, the nightingale

The tawny-throated!

Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!

What triumph! hark! —what pain!

O wanderer from a Grecian shore,

Still, after many years, in distant lands,

Still nourishing in thy bewildered brain
That wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain
Say, will it never heal?

And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and night,
And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the dew,

To thy racked heart and brain
Afford no balm ?

Dost thou to-night behold,

Here, through the moonlight on this English grass. The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?

Dost thou again peruse

With hot cheeks and seared eyes

The too clear web, and thy dumb sister's shame?
Dost thou once more essay

Thy flight, and feel come over thee,

Poor fugitive, the feathery change

Once more, and once more seem to make resound

With love and hate, triumph and agony,

Lone Daulis, and the high Cephisian vale?

Listen, Eugenia

How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves ! thou hearest?

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Eternal passion!

Eternal pain!

IMMORTALITY.

FOILED by our fellow-men, depressed, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life, we say,

The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne.

And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn
The world's poor, routed leavings? or will they,
Who failed under the heat of this life's day,
Support the fervors of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagged not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing - only he,
His soul well knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

EAST LONDON.

'T WAS August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.

I met a preacher there I knew, and said:

'Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene ?’'Bravely!' said he; for I of late have been

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.'

O human soul! as long as thou canst so

Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam

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Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night! Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.

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