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A PAUSE OF THOUGHT.

I LOOKED for that which is not, nor can be,

And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth :

But years must pass before a hope of youth

Is resigned utterly.

I watched and waited with a steadfast will:
And though the object seemed to flee away
That I so longed for, ever day by day

I watched and waited still.

Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more ;
My expectation wearies and shall cease;

I will resign it now and be at peace :
Yet never gave it o'er.

Sometimes I said: It is an empty name

I long for; to a name why should I give The peace of all the days I have to live ?— Yet gave it all the same.

Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit

For healthy joy and salutary pain :

Thou knowest the chase useless, and again

Turnest to follow it.

Grow

TWILIGHT CALM.

Он, pleasant eventide !

Clouds on the western side

grey and greyer hiding the warm sun :

The bees and birds, their happy labours done,

Seek their close nests and bide.

Screened in the leafy wood

The stock-doves sit and brood:

The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough

But lazily; pauses; and settles now

Where once he stored his food.

One by one the flowers close,

Lily and dewy rose

Shutting their tender petals from the moon :

The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon

Are still the noisy crows.

The dormouse squats and eats

Choice little dainty bits

Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime;

Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time

And listens where he sits.

From far the lowings come

Of cattle driven home:

From farther still the wind brings fitfully

The vast continual murmur of the sea,

Now loud, now almost dumb.

The gnats whirl in the air,

The evening gnats; and there

The owl opes

For

broad his eyes and wings to sail

prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail

Comes forth, clammy and bare.

H

Her

Hark! that's the nightingale,

Telling the selfsame tale

song told when this ancient earth was young:

So echoes answered when her song was sung

In the first wooded vale.

We call it love and pain

The passion of her strain;

And yet we little understand or know :

Why should it not be rather joy that so
Throbs in each throbbing vein?

In separate herds the deer

Lie; here the bucks, and here

The does, and by its mother sleeps the fawn :

Through all the hours of night until the dawn

They sleep, forgetting fear.

The hare sleeps where it lies,
With wary half-closed eyes;

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