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Song from "Undine.”

THERE was a kingdom fair to see,

But pale, so pale, with never a rose : The cold wind blows across the lea, Westward the pale sun goes.

There was a maiden, soft and dear,
But pale, so pale, with never a rose:
Each quivering eyelid holds a tear,
Seaward her sad heart goes,

...

Children.

WATCH with me and listen

By the sweet enchanted bowers,

Where the children dance with children, hand in hand!

Bright their blue eyes glisten

Like the dew-besprinkled flowers,

When the morning stoops to kiss the sleeping land!

Hear the laughter flowing,

Like a brook's melodious bubble,

From the happy heart of boy and girl at play!
Clouds o'erhead are blowing

That are charged with tears of trouble:
But the winds of God shall drive them on to-day.

Dancing to the measure

Of benignant music's rapture,

How the melody their eagerness controls !
Lo! the sprite of pleasure

We so vainly strive to capture

Is the playmate and companion of their souls!

Morwenstow.

NATURE bestows on every place
A gloom, a glory, or a grace;

But yet strange power belongs to man
The hill and vale to bless or ban.

Here, by this black, forbidding coast,
Dwelt one who heard the heavenly host
Singing in every wind that blows,

In wave that breaks or stream that flows.

And surely deemed that love divine,
Whose tendrils all his church entwine,
Is not too distant to be won
By Nature's humblest orison.

Wherefore amid these moors and steeps
His spirit ever laughs and weeps,
Weeps with the storm or laughs with glee
For rhythmic laughter of the sea;

No longer mute, the token stream
Repeats the pathos of his dream;
His dirge for days remembered not
Is echoed from Morwenna's grot;
And pilgrims when they pause to con
The sacred well-house of Saint John,
Whose fountain feeds the lustral bowl
Wherein is laved each infant soul,

Or linger by St. Nectan's Kieve,
Watching the foamy waters leave
Their mossy cave, to seek for rest
In Severn Sea's unslumbering breast,

Or stray where rushy Tamar spills
Her new-born flood in slender rills,
Unguessing in her modest source
The goodly channel of her course,

Shall hear the river murmuring low
The melodies of Morwenstow,
While distant surges chime and toll
Antiphony from sound or shoal,

Shall hear the whisper of the well,
The clamour of the torrent, tell
Of him who had strange power to teach
Their wordless voices human speech.

There Shall be Weeping.

THERE is a river ordained to roam
Where never the slow kine feed,
Where never the warbler builds her home,
By vale, or forest, or mead.

Barren and sullen and black it creeps,
Bearing nor boat nor barge;
Nothing is fashioned within its deeps,

Nothing along its marge.

Never the city it leaps to lave,

Never o'erbrims its side

To moisten the meadow; across its wave Never the swallows glide.

Flowerless glimmers its pallid edge,

Treeless shimmers its sheen; Nowhere its shallows are set with sedge, Nowhere with rushes green.

Salt from its birth in the marsh of wrong,
Bitter with tribute rills,

Its home is not in the sea, its song
Is not of the pure, blue hills.

Shrouded in mist, it makes its moan
Of the burden of mortal years,

Like the cry of a child, in the night, alone;
And men have called it Tears.

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