The voice grew faint: there came a further change;
Again arose the mystic mountain-range :

Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;

By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patched with moss.
Then some one spake: "Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time."
Another said: "The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame."
And one : "He had not wholly quenched his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour."
At last I heard a voice upon the slope

Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?"

To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand:
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made himself an awful rose of dawn.

THE SKIPPING-ROPE.

SURE never yet was Antelope
Could skip so lightly by.

Stand off, or else my skipping-rope

Will hit you in the eye.

How lightly whirls the skipping-rope!

How fairy-like you fly!

Go, get you gone, you muse and mope

I hate that silly sigh.

Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,

Or tell me how to die.

There, take it, take my skipping-rope,

And hang yourself thereby.

Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,

O, happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.

Ah, bear me with thee, lightly borne, Dip forward under starry light, And move me to my marriage-morn, And round again to happy night.

BREAK, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, oh Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To the haven under the hill;

But oh for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, oh Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

THE POET'S SONG.

THE rain had fallen, the Poet arose,

He passed by the town, and out of the street; A light wind blew from the gates of the sun, And waves of shadow went over the wheat, And he sat him down in a lonely place,

And chanted a melody loud and sweet, That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray,

The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey,