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, ... 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! That are charged with tears of trouble: Dancing to the measure Of benignant music's rapture, How the melody their eagerness controls ! We so vainly strive to capture Is the playmate and companion of their souls! Morwenstow. NATURE bestows on every place But yet strange power belongs to man Here, by this black, forbidding coast, In wave that breaks or stream that flows. And surely deemed that love divine, Wherefore amid these moors and steeps No longer mute, the token stream Or linger by St. Nectan's Kieve, Or stray where rushy Tamar spills Shall hear the river murmuring low Shall hear the whisper of the well, There Shall be Weeping. THERE is a river ordained to roam Barren and sullen and black it creeps, 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, Its home is not in the sea, its song Shrouded in mist, it makes its moan Like the cry of a child, in the night, alone; |