All my lamps burn scented oil,
Hung on laden orange-trees,
Whose shadowed foliage is the foil
To golden lamps and oranges.
Heap my golden plates with fruit,
Golden fruit, fresh-plucked and ripe;
Strike the bells and breathe the pipe;
Shut out showers from summer hours-
Silence that complaining lute-
Shut out thinking, shut out pain,
From hours that cannot come again.

Strike the bells solemnly,

Ding dong deep :

My friend is passing to his bed,

Fast asleep;

There's plaited linen round his head,
While foremost go his feet-
His feet that cannot carry him.
My feast's a show, my lights are dim;

Be still, your music is not sweet,—
There is no music more for him :

His lights are out, his feast is done: His bowl that sparkled to the brim Is drained, is broken, cannot hold; My blood is chill, his blood is cold;

His death is full, and mine begun.

THE BOURNE.

UNDERNEATH the growing grass,

Underneath the living flowers, Deeper than the sound of showers : There we shall not count the hours By the shadows as they pass.

Youth and health will be but vain,
Beauty reckoned of no worth:
There a very little girth

Can hold round what once the earth Seemed too narrow to contain.

SONG.

OH what comes over the sea.

Shoals and quicksands past;

And what comes home to me,
Sailing slow, sailing fast?

A wind comes over the sea
With a moan in its blast;
But nothing comes home to me,
Sailing slow, sailing fast.

Let me be, let me be,

For my lot is cast:
Land or sea all's one to me,

And sail it slow or fast.

I

VENUS'S LOOKING-GLASS.

MARKED where lovely Venus and her court

With song and dance and merry laugh went by ; Weightless, their wingless feet seemed made to fly, Bound from the ground and in mid air to sport. Left far behind I heard the dolphins snort,

Tracking their goddess with a wistful eye, Around whose head white doves rose, wheeling high Or low, and cooed after their tender sort. All this I saw in Spring. Through Summer heat I saw the lovely Queen of Love no more.

But when flushed Autumn through the woodlands

went

I spied sweet Venus walk amid the wheat:

Whom seeing, every harvester gave o'er

His toil, and laughed and hoped and was content.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING.

LOVE that is dead and buried, yesterday

Out of his grave rose up before my face;
No recognition in his look, no trace
Of memory in his eyes dust-dimmed and grey.
While I, remembering, found no word to say,

But felt my quickened heart leap in its place;
Caught afterglow thrown back from long set days,

Caught echoes of all music passed away.

Was this indeed to meet?—I mind me yet

In youth we met when hope and love were quick, We parted with hope dead, but love alive:

I mind me how we parted then heart sick,

Remembering, loving, hopeless, weak to strive:— Was this to meet? Not so, we have not met.

THE

BIRD RAPTURES.

HE sunrise wakes the lark to sing,
The moonrise wakes the nightingale.
Come darkness, moonrise, everything
That is so silent, sweet, and pale,
Come, so ye wake the nightingale.

Make haste to mount, thou wistful moor..
Make haste to wake the nightingale :

Let silence set the world in tune

To hearken to that wordless tale
Which warbles from the nightingale.

O herald skylark, stay thy flight
One moment, for a nightingale
Floods us with sorrow and delight.
To-morrow thou shalt hoist the sail ;
Leave us to-night the nightingale.

HOW

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS.

OW comes it, Flora, that, whenever we
Play cards together, you invariably,
However the pack parts,

Still hold the Queen of Hearts?

I've scanned you with a scrutinising gaze,
Resolved to fathom these your secret ways:
But, sift them as I will,

Your ways are secret still.

I cut and shuffle; shuffle, cut, again;
But all my cutting. shuffling, proves in vain :
Vain hope, vain forethought too;

That Queen still falls to you.

I dropped her once, prepense; but, ere the deal Was dealt, your instinct seemed her loss to feel: "There should be one card more,"

You said, and searched the floor.

I cheated once; I made a private notch

In Heart-Queen's back, and kept a lynx-eyed watch; Yet such another back

Deceived me in the pack:

The Queen of Clubs assumed by arts unknown
An imitative dint that seemed my own;