See, there is one of us sobbing,

No limit to his distress;

And another, a lord of all things, praying

To his own great self, as I guess; And another, a statesman there, betraying

His party-secret, fool, to the press; And yonder a vile physician, blabbing The case of his patient-all for what? To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,

And wheedle a world that loves him not,

For it is but a world of the dead,

IV.

Nothing but idiot gabble!
For the prophecy given of old
And then not understood,
Has come to pass as foretold;
Not let any man think for the public
good,

But babble, merely for babble.
For I never whisper'd a private affair
Within the hearing of cat or mouse,
No, not to myself in the closet alone,
But I heard it shouted at once from
the top of the house;
Everything came to be known:
Who told him we were there?

the awa

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims

Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,

And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;

And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd!

Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep

For those that are crush'd in the clash of jarring claims,

Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

And noble thought be freer under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with one desire ;

For the peace, that I deem'd no peace, is over and done,

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

V.

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,

We have proved we have hearts in a 靠 cause, we are noble still,

And nothing perfect: yet the brook ho loved,

For which, in branding summers of Bengal,

Or ev'n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air

I panted, seems, as I re-listen to it, Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,

To me that loved him; for 'O Brook,'

he says,

'O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,

"Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? replies:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go But I go on for ever.

"Poor lad, be died at Florence

quite worn out.

Beyond the brook, waist-deep in meadow-sweet.

mbet I suffer'd for your sake!

He pointed out a pasturing colt, and said:

That was the four year-old I sold the Squire.'

And there he told a long long-winded tale

Of how the Squire had seen the coit at grass,

And how it was the thing his daughter wish'd,

And how he sent the bailiff to the farm To learn the price, and what the price he ask'd,

And how the bailiff swore that he was mad,

But he stood firm and so the matter hung;

He gave them line: and five days after that

He met the bailiff at the Golden Fleece, Who then and there had offer'd something more,

But he stood firm, and so the matter hung;

He knew the man; the colt would fetch its price;

He gave them line: and how by chance at last

(It might be May or April, he forgot, The last of April or the first of May) He found the bailiff riding by the farm, And, talking from the point he drew him in,

And there he mellow'd all his heart with ale,

Until they closed a bargain, hand in hand.

'Then, while I breathed in sight of haven, he,

We turn'd our foreheads from the falling sun,

And following our own shadows thrice as long

As when they follow'd us from Philip's door,

Arrived, and found the sun of sweet content

Re-risen in Katie's eyes, and all things well.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

Yes, men may come and go; and these are gone,

All gone. My dearest brother, Edmund sleeps,

Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire,

But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome Of Brunelleschi, sleeps in peace and he,

Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words

Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb: I scraped the lichen from it: Katie