For ever; and whatever tempests lour
For ever silent; even if they broke
In thunder, silent; yet remember all
He spoke among you, and the Man who
spoke;

Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor palter'd with Eternal God for power;
Who let the turbid streams of rumour flow
Thro' either babbling world of high and
low;

Whose life was work, whose language rife
With rugged maxims hewn from life;
Who never spoke against a foe;
Whose eighty winters freeze with one re-
buke

All great self-seekers trampling on the right:

Truth-teller was our England's Alfred named;

Truth-lover was our English Duke;
Whatever record leap to light
He never shall be shamed.

VIII

Lo, the leader in these glorious wars
Now to glorious burial slowly borne,
Follow'd by the brave of other lands,
He, on whom from both her open hands
Lavish Honour shower'd all her stars,
And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn.
Yea, let all good things await
Him who cares not to be great,
But as he saves or serves the state.

Not once or twice in our rough islandstory,

The path of duty was the way to glory;
He that walks it, only thirsting
For the right, and learns to deaden
Love of self, before his journey closes,
He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting
Into glossy purples, which outredden
All voluptuous garden-roses.
Not once or twice in our fair island-story,
The path of duty was the way to glory:
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has

won

His path upward, and prevail'd,

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and

sun.

Such was he: his work is done,

But while the races of mankind endure,
Let his great example stand
Colossal, seen of every land,

And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure:

Till in all lands and thro' all human story
The path of duty be the way to glory:
And let the land whose hearths he saved
from shame

For many and many an age proclaim

At civic revel and pomp and game,
And when the long-illumined cities flame,
Their ever-loyal iron leader's fame,
With honour, honour, honour, honour to
him,

Eternal honour to his name.

IX

Peace, his triumph will be sung
By some yet unmoulded tongue
Far on in summers that we shall not see:
Peace, it is a day of pain

For one about whose patriarchal knee
Late the little children clung:

O peace, it is a day of pain

For one, upon whose hand and heart and brain

Once the weight and fate of Europe hung.
Ours the pain, be his the gain!
More than is of man's degree
Must be with us, watching here
At this, our great solemnity.
Whom we see not we revere,
We revere, and we refrain

From talk of battles loud and vain,
And brawling memories all too free
For such a wise humility

As befits a solemn fane:
We revere, and while we hear
The tides of Music's golden sea
Setting toward eternity,

Uplifted high in heart and hope are we,
Until we doubt not that for one so true
There must be other nobler work to do
Than when he fought at Waterloo,
And Victor he must ever be.
For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break, and work their will;
Tho' world on world in myriad myriads
roll

Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our
trust.

Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's

ears:

The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears:

The black earth yawns: the mortal disap

pears;

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust:
He is gone who seem'd so great.
Gone; but nothing can bereave him
Of the force he made his own
Being here, and we believe him
Something far advanced in State,
And that he wears a truer crown
Than any wreath that man can weave him.
Speak no more of his renown,
Lay your earthly fancies down,
And in the vast cathedral leave him.
God accept him, Christ receive him.

And stern and sad (so rare the smile
Of sunlight) look'd the Lombard piles;
Porch-pillars on the lion resting,
And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.

O Milan, O the chanting quires,
The giant windows' blazon'd fires,

The height, the space, the gloom,
glory!

A mount of marble, a hundred spires
I climb'd the roofs at break of day;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.

I stood among the silent statues, And statued pinnacles, mute as they.

How faintly-flush'd, how phantom-fair, Was Monte Rosa, hanging there

A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.

Remember how we came at last
To Como; shower and storm and blast

Had blown the lake beyond his limit, And all was flooded; and how we past

From Como, when the light was grey,
And in my head, for half the day,

The rich Virgilian rustic measure
Of Lari Maxume, all the way,

Like ballad-burthen music, kept,
As on the Lariano crept

To that fair port below the castle
Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;

Or hardly slept, but watch'd awake
A cypress in the moonlight shake,

The moonlight touching o'er a terrace On tall Agave above the lake.

What more? we took our last adieu,
And up the snowy Splugen drew,

But ere we reach'd the highest summ I pluck'd a daisy, I gave it you.

It told of England then to me,
And now it tells of Italy.

O love, we two shall go no longer
To lands of summer across the sea;

So dear a life your arms enfold
Whose crying is a cry for gold:

Yet here to-night in this dark city,
When ill and weary, alone and cold,

I found, tho' crush'd to hard and dry, This nurseling of another sky

Still in the little book you lent me,
And where you tenderly laid it by:

And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens Heaven and Eart
The bitter east, the misty summer
And grey metropolis of the North.

Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain, Perchance, to charm a vacant brain, Perchance, to dream you still beside me, My fancy fled to the South again.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

[1854]

I

HALF a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

II

'Forward, the Light Brigade!' Was there a man dismay'd? Not tho' the soldier knew

Some one had blunder'd: Their's not to make reply, Their's not to reason why, Their's but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them

Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while

All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not,
Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them

Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well

Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

SONG FROM THE BROOK

[1855]

I COME from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men maỷ go,
But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

XII

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,

And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,

Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea,

War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

XIII

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill,

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam, That the smooth-faced snubnosed rogue

would leap from his counter and till, And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home.

XIV

What am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood?

Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die

Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood

On a horror of shatter'd limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?

XV

Would there be sorrow for me? there was love in the passionate shriek, Love for the silent thing that had made false haste to the grave Wrapt in a cloak, as I saw him, and thought he would rise and speak And rave at the lie and the liar, ah God, as he used to rave.

XVI

I am sick of the Hall and the hill, I am sick of the moor and the main. Why should I stay? can a sweeter chance ever come to me here?

O, having the nerves of motion as well as the nerves of pain,

Were it not wise if I fled from the place and the pit and the fear?

XVII

Workmen up at the Hall!-they are coming back from abroad;

The dark old place will be gilt by the touch of a millionaire:

I have heard, I know not whence, of the singular beauty of Maud;

I play'd with the girl when a child; she promised then to be fair.

XVIII

Maud with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,

Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,

Long have I sigh'd for a calm; God grant I may find it at last!

It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt,

But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past,

Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been

For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of the rose,

Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose,

From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.

The chow III

Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek,

Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd,

Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek,

Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;

Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong

Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before

Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,

Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long

Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,

But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,

Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,

Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave,