The silver fountains sing forever. Far
Above dim ghosts of waters in the caves,
The royal robe of morning on thy head
Abides forever! Evermore the wind
Is thy august companion; and thy peers
Are cloud, and thunder, and the face sublime
Of blue mid-heaven! On thy awful brow
Is Deity; and in that voice of thine
There is the great imperial utterance
Of God forever; and thy feet are set
Where evermore, through all the days and

years,

There rolls the grand hymn of the deathless

wave.

COOGEE

SING the song of wave-worn Coogee, Coogee in the distance white,

With its jags and points disrupted, gaps and fractures fringed with light; Haunt of gledes, and restless plovers of the melancholy wail,

Ever lending deeper pathos to the melancholy gale.

There, my brothers, down the fissures, chasms deep and wan and wild, Grows the sea-bloom, one that blushes like a shrinking, fair, blind child; And amongst the oozing forelands many a glad green rock-vine runs, Getting ease on earthy ledges, sheltered from December suns.

Often, when a gusty morning, rising cold

and gray and strange, Lifts its face from watery spaces, vistas full with cloudy change, Bearing up a gloomy burden which anon begins to wane,

Fading in the sudden shadow of a dark determined rain,

Do I seek an eastern window, so to watch

the breakers beat

Round the steadfast crags of Coogee, dim with drifts of driving sleet: Hearing hollow mournful noises sweeping down a solemn shore,

While the grim sea-caves are tideless, and the storm strives at their core.

Often when the floating vapors fill the silent autumn leas, Dreaming memories fall like moonlight over silent sleeping seas,

Youth and I and Love together! other times and other themes

Come to me unsung, unwept for, through the faded evening gleams.

Come to me and touch me mutely — I that looked and longed so well,

Shall I look and yet forget them? - who may know or who foretell ? Though the southern wind roams, shadowed with its immemorial grief,

Where the frosty wings of Winter leave their whiteness on the leaf.

Friend of mine beyond the waters, here and there these perished days Haunt me with their sweet dead faces and their old divided ways.

You that helped and you that loved me, take this song, and when you read Let the lost things come about you, set your thoughts, and hear and heed. Time has laid his burden on us - we who wear our manhood now, We would be the boys we have been, free of heart and bright of brow,

Be the boys for just an hour, with the splendor and the speech

Of thy lights and thunders, Coogee, flying up thy gleaming beach.

Heart's desire and heart's division! who would come and say to me, With the eyes of far-off friendship, "You are as you used to be?" Something glad and good has left me here with sickening discontent, Tired of looking, neither knowing what it was or where it went.

So it is this sight of Coogee, shining in the morning dew,

Sets me stumbling through dim summers once on fire with youth and you— Summers pale as southern evenings when the year has lost its power And the wasted face of April weeps above the withered flower.

Not that seasons bring no solace, not that time lacks light and rest,

But the old things were the dearest, and the old loves seem the best. We that start at songs familiar, we that tremble at a tone

Floating down the ways of music, like a sigh of sweetness flown,

the flowers,

With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,

And gleams like a dream in his face-
Like a marvellous dream in his face ?

THE VOICE IN THE WILD OAK

TWELVE years ago, when I could face High heaven's dome with different eyes, In days full-flowered with hours of grace, And nights not sad with sighs,

I wrote a song in which I strove

To shadow forth thy strain of woe, Dark widowed sister of the grove Twelve wasted years ago.

But youth was then too young to find
Those high authentic syllables
Whose voice is like the wintering wind
By sunless mountain fells ;
Nor had I sinned and suffered then
To that superlative degree
That I would rather seek, than men,
Wild fellowship with thee.

But he who hears this autumn day

Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,
Is one whose hair was shot with gray
By grief instead of time.

He has no need, like many a bard,
To sing imaginary pain,
Because he bears, and finds it hard,
The punishment of Cain.

No more he sees the affluence
Which makes the heart of Nature glad ;
For he has lost the fine first sense
Of beauty that he had.

The old delight God's happy breeze
Was wont to give, to grief has grown ;
And therefore, Niobe of trees,
His song is like thine own.

But I, who am that perished soul,
Have wasted so these powers of mine,
That I can never write that whole,
Pure, perfect speech of thine.
Some lord of words august, supreme,
The grave, grand melody demands;
The dark translation of thy theme
I leave to other hands.

Yet here, where plovers nightly call Across dim melancholy leas

Where comes by whistling fen and fall
The moan of far-off seas-
A gray old Fancy often sits

Beneath thy shade with tired wings, And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits With awful utterings.

Then times there are when all the words
Are like the sentences of one
Shut in by fate from wind and birds
And light of stars and sun!
No dazzling dryad, but a dark

Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be Imprisoned, cramped in bands of bark, For all eternity.

Yea, like the speech of one aghast

At Immortality in chains,

What time the lordly storm rides past

With flames and arrowy rains: Some wan Tithonus of the wood,

White with immeasurable years An awful ghost, in solitude

With moaning moors and meres !

And when high thunder smites the hill
And hunts the wild dog to his den,
Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill
And shriek from glen to glen,
As if a frightful memory whipped

Thy soul for some infernal crime That left it blasted, blind, and strippedA dread to Death and Time!

But when the fair-haired August dies, And flowers wax strong and beautiful, Thy songs are stately harmonies

By wood-lights green and cool,
Most like the voice of one who shows
Through sufferings fierce, in fine relief,
A noble patience and repose -
A dignity in grief.

But, ah! conceptions fade away,
And still the life that lives in thee,
The soul of thy majestic lay,
Remains a mystery!

And he must speak the speech divine,
The language of the high-throned lords,
Who'd give that grand old theme of thine
Its sense in faultless words.

By hollow lands and sea-tracts harsh,
With ruin of the fourfold gale,
Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh,
Still wail thy lonely wail;

And, year by year, one step will break
The sleep of far hill-folded streams,
And seek, if only for thy sake,

Thy home of many dreams.

More than ever you could gather-
More than ever you could glean
From our tale.

We have seen, and heard, and laughed,
As we tossed the shattered craft,
While those on board, aghast,
Every moment thought their last,
In the gale.

We tossed them like a plaything,
And rent their riven sail;
And we laughed our loud Ha! ha !
With the demons of the gale
In their ears.

We have laughed, and heard, and seen,
In the lightning's lurid sheen,

And the growling thunder's blast ;
And we drowned them all at last

For their fears.

There were mothers there on board

With their little ones in arms; There were maidens there on board More lovely in their charms Than the day;

And again we heard, and laughed As we dashed across the craft;

While our master shrieked and roared,
As we swept them overboard,
And away.

And they battled all in vain,

With their puny human strength. In our grasp they were as nothing; Down, down, they sank at length In the sea;

And still again we screamed,
As the lurid flashes gleamed,
And o'er their heads we swept,
And for joy we danced and leapt
In our glee.

This, this, now is the tale
We have to tell to-day,
And now to you we've sung it
In our merry, mocking way.
Do you hear?

How our havoc we have wrought,
And to destruction brought
The treasures of the Earth,
Held by man in price, and worth,
Very dear?

Oh! ye cruel waves up-dashing,
Why rejoice you so to-day?
As shoreward ye come crashing
From your cruel, cruel play;
Why fling ye up your spray
On the shore?

The sand your salt spume splashing,
As ye frolic in your glee;
As the iron rocks ye 're lashing,
Ye scourges of the sea,
Will ye never then be glutted
Any more?