I shall never see her more Where the reeds and rushes quiver, Stand beside the sobbing river, Quit your cowslips, cowslips yellow; Come uppe Lightfoot, rise and follow, From your clovers lift the head; Come uppe Jetty, follow, follow, Jetty, to the milking shed." SLEEP. SLEEP, we are beholden to thee, sleep, Saints out of heaven with palms. Seen by thy light Love is a pouting child. Sleep, in the world to come how strange 't will be Never to want, never to wish for thee! A REVERIE. 75 WHEN A REVERIE. I do sit apart And commune with my heart, She brings me forth the treasures once my own: Where leaf-buds swelled apace, And wasting rims of snow in sunlight shone. Rock, in a mossy glade, The larch-trees lend thee shade, White tufts of snowdrops peep, And melted rime drips softly from thine eaves. Ah, rock, I know, I know That yet thy snowdrops grow, And yet doth sunshine flick them through the tree, Where sheltering branches hide The cottage at its side, That nevermore will shade or shelter me. Once to that cottage door, In happy days of yore, My little love made footprints in the snow. She was so glad of spring, She helped the birds to sing, I know she dwells there yet the rest I do not know They sang, and would not stop, I heard the melted rime in sunshine fall: Where leaned the daffodils, Murmured and murmured on, and that was all. I think, but cannot tell, I think she loved me well, And some dear fancy with my future twined. Hope faints, and lets it go, That passionate want forbid to speak its mind. LITTLE clouds lie still, like flocks of sheep, WORK. LIKE coral insects multitudinous The minutes are whereof our life is made. They build it up as in the deep's blue shade It grows, it comes to light, and then, and thus For both there is an end. The populous Sea-blossoms close, our minutes that have paid Life's debt of work are spent; the work is laid Before our feet that shall come after us. We may not stay to watch if it will speed, THE LONG WHITE SEAM. The bard if on some luter's string his song 77 Doth shine. Work is its own best earthly meed, Else have we none more than the sea-born throng Who wrought these marvellous isles that bloom afar. TH THOUGH ALL GREAT DEEDS. HOUGH all great deeds were proved but fables fine, Though earth's old story could be told anew, Though the sweet fashions loved of them that sue Were empty as the ruined Delphian shrine Though God did never man, in words benign, With sense of His great Fatherhood endue, Though life immortal were a dream untrue, And He that promised it were not divine Though soul, though spirit were not, and all hope Reaching beyond the bourne, melted away; Though virtue had no goal and good no scope, But both were doomed to end with this our clay Though all these were not, to the ungraced heir Would this remain, - to live, as though they were. THE LONG WHITE SEAM. AS I came round the harbor buoy, The lights began to gleam, No wave the land-locked water stirred, And I marked my love by candle-light It's aye sewing ashore, my dear, It's reef and furl, and haul the line, I climbed to reach her cottage door; Like a shaft of light her voice breaks forth, As the shining water leaped of old When stirred by angel wings. Aye longing to list anew, Awake and in my dream, But never a song she sang like this Fair fall the lights, the harbor lights, And peace drop down on that low roof And the voice, my dear, that rang so clear For O, for O, with brows bent low OUR only greatness is that we aspire. |