Renouncement.

I MUST not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the thought that lurks in all delight-
The thought of thee-and in the blue Heaven's
height,

And in the sweetest passage of a song.

Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright;

But it must never, never come in sight;

I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, And all my bonds I needs must loose apart, Must doff my will as raiment laid away,—

With the first dream that comes with the first sleep I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

Future Poetry.

No new delights to our desire
The singers of the past can yield.
I lift mine eyes to hill and field,
And see in them your yet dumb lyre,
Poets unborn and unrevealed.

Singers to come, what thoughts will start

To song? What words of yours be sent Through man's soul, and with earth be blent? These worlds of nature and the heart

Await you like an instrument.

Who knows what musical flocks of words
Upon these pine-tree tops will light,
And crown these towers in circling flight,
And cross these seas like summer birds,
And give a voice to the day and night?
Something of you already is ours;

Some mystic part of you belongs
To us whose dreams your future throngs,
Who look on hills, and trees, and flowers,
That will mean so much in your songs.

I wonder, like the maid who found,

And knelt to lift, the lyre supreme
Of Orpheus from the Thracian stream.
She dreams on its sealed past profound;
On a deep future sealed I dream.

She bears it in her wanderings

Within her arms, and has not pressed Her unskilled fingers, but her breast Upon those silent sacred strings;

I, too, clasp mystic strings at rest.

For I, i' the world of lands and seas,
The sky of wind and rain and fire,
And in man's world of long desire-
In all that is yet dumb in these-
Have found a more mysterious lyre.

A Dead Harvest.

(IN KENSINGTON Gardens.)

ALONG the graceless grass of town
They rake the rows of red and brown,
Dead leaves, unlike the rows of hay,
Delicate, neither gold nor grey,
Raked long ago and far away.

A narrow silence in the park;
Between the lights a narrow dark.
One street rolls on the north, and one,
Muffled, upon the south doth run.
Amid the mist the work is done.

A futile crop; for it the fire Smoulders, and, for a stack, a pyre. So go the town's lives on the breeze, Even as the sheddings of the trees; Bosom nor barn is filled with these.

On Death.

WHY question what my thoughts of death may be? Behold 'tis Autumn-in yon poplar mass,

Whose green ripples to silver breezily,

Dangle pale yellow leaves like lemons large;
And lo! beyond there! what has come to pass ?
Suave haze and sunshine from its utmost marge
Have taken London to their mighty keeping,
Which, self-forgetful, smiles in glory sleeping:
And here hath she flown down whom children charge
"Fly away home"-and busily is creeping

A scurrying carnelian on my sleeve.—

O Lady Bird, begone;

We men forebode; stay, thou wilt ne'er believe,
Nor spoil glad hours whilst yet their sands run on.

Self-questioned ignorance yields no reply;
And thus there grows an aching in our ear
Which stir of insect wings can magnify

And hear whole flights of angels oar their vans—
Nothing is silent when the heart will hear;

All echoes, answers; yet the thought is man's,
Not a new thought, brings not new knowledge, never
Breaks on the silence where his brain dwells ever,
Nor peoples that vast night the mind's eye scans,
Nor can prized beauties from what pains love sever.-
Wise, heartless Lady Bird, hear thou, thy home
Is burnt, thy children flown;

Yet be not less industrious to roam

The infant's hand, who makes such harsh things known.