XC.

IF

any

vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain

As but the canker of the brain; Yea, though it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,

I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And tho' the months, revolving near,

Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,

But spiritual presentiments,

And such refraction of events

As often rises ere they rise.

XCI.

I SHALL not see thee.

Dare I say

No spirit ever brake the band

That stays him from the native land, Where first he walk'd when claspt in clay?

No visual shade of some one lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may come

Where all the nerve of sense is numb; Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

O, therefore from thy sightless range
With gods in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;

That in this blindness of the frame

My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

XCII.

How

pure

at heart and sound in head,

With what divine affections bold

Should be the man whose thought would hold

An hour's communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,

Except, like them, thou too canst say

My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast,
Imaginations calm and fair,

The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest:

But when the heart is full of din,

And doubt beside the portal waits
They can but listen at the gates

And hear the household jar within.

XCIII.

By night we linger'd on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry ;

And genial warmth; and o'er the sky

The silvery haze of summer drawn ;

And calm that let the tapers burn

Unwavering not a cricket chirr'd : The brook alone far-off was heard And on the board the fluttering urn:

And bats went round in fragrant skies,
And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes

That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes

And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;

While now we sang old songs that

peal'd

From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease,

The white kine glimmer'd and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field.

But when those others, one by one,
Withdrew themselves from me and night,

And in the house light after light
Went out, and I was all alone,

A hunger seized my heart; I read

Of that glad year which once had been,

In those fall'n leaves which kept their green, The noble letters of the dead :

And strangely on the silence broke

The silent-speaking words, and strange Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell

On doubts that drive the coward back, And keen thro' wordy snares to track Suggestion to her inmost cell.

So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touch'd me from the past,

And all at once it seem'd at last

His living soul was flash'd on mine,