XIII.

He cannot yet 1. Tears of the widower, when he sees

realize his

A late-lost form that sleep reveals, And moves his doubtful arms, and feels Her place is empty, fall like these;

2. Which weep a loss for ever new,

A void where heart on heart reposed; And, where warm hands have prest and closed,

Silence, till I be silent too;

3. Which weep the comrade of my choice,
An awful thought, a life removed,
The human-hearted man I loved,

A spirit, not a breathing voice.

4. Come, Time, and teach me, many years, I do not suffer in a dream;

For now so strange do these things seem,

Mine eyes have leisure for their tears,

5. My fancies time to rise on wing,

And glance about the approaching sails,

As tho' they brought but merchants' bales,

And not the burthen that they bring.

XIV.

To see Arthur 1. If one should bring me this report,

again would

not seem

strange.

That thou hadst touch'd the land to

day,

And I went down unto the quay,

And found thee lying in the port;

The storm of the evening is reflected in the poet's mood.

2. And standing, muffled round with woe,
Should see thy passengers in rank

J

Come stepping lightly down the plank, And beckoning unto those they know;

3. And if along with these should come
The man I held as half-divine, •
Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
And ask a thousand things of home;

4. And I should tell him all my pain,

And how my life had droop'd of late, And he should sorrow o'er my state And marvel what possess'd my brain;

5. And I perceived no touch of change,
No hint of death in all his frame,
But found him all in all the same,
should not feel it to be strange.

XV. L

1. To-night the winds begin to rise

And roar from yonder dropping day:
The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;

2. The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world:

3. And but for fancies, which aver

That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir

4. That makes the barren branches loud;
And Lut for fear it is not so,

The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud

5. That rises upward always higher,

And onward drags a laboring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire.

XVI.

The poet is in 1. What words are these have fallen from me! despair at his

waverings of

mind and

spirit.

Can calm despair and wild unrest
Be tenants of a single breast,

Or Sorrow such a changeling be?

2. Or doth she only seem to take

The touch of change in calm or storm, But knows no more of transient form In her deep self than some dead lake

3. That holds the shadow of a lark

Hung in the shadow of a heaven?
Or has the shock, so harshly given,
Confused me like the unhappy bark

4. That strikes by night a craggy shelf, And staggers blindly ere she sink?

And stunn'd me from my power to think

And all my knowledge of myself;

5. And made me that delirious man
Whose fancy fuses old and new,
And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan?

XVII.

Blessings on the good ship that has brought home the body.

1. Thou comest, much wept for; such a breeze Compell'd thy canvas, and my prayer Was as the whisper of an air

To breathe thee over lonely seas.

2. For I in spirit saw thee move

Thro' circles of the bounding sky,
Week after week: the days go by:
Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

3. Henceforth, wherever thou mayst roam,
My blessing, like a line of light,
Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.

4. So may whatever tempest mars

Mid-ocean spare thee, sacred bark, And balmy drops in summer dark Slide from the bosom of the stars,

5. So kind an office hath been done,

<

Such precious relics brought by thee,
The dust of him I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run.

XVIII.

Thoughts on hearing of the burial at Clevedon.

1. "T is well; 't is something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.

2. "T is little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest,
Among familiar names to rest
And in the places of his youth.

3. Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep,

And hear the ritual of the dead.

4. Ah yet, even yet, if this might be,
I, falling on his faithful heart,

Would breathing thro' his lips impart
The life that almost dies in me;

5. That dies not, but endures with pain,
And slowly forms the firmer mind,
Treasuring the look it cannot find,
The words that are not heard again.

XIX.

He finds the 1. The Danube to the Severn gave

ebb and flow of the Wye

symbolic of his moods.

The darken'd heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave.

2. There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.

3. The Wye is hush'd nor moved along,
And hush'd my deepest grief of all,
When, fill'd with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.

4. The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.