No coarse and blockish God of acreage Stands at thy gate for thee to grovel toThy God is far diffused in noble groves And princely halls, and farms, and flowing lawns,

And heaps of living gold that daily grow, And title-scrolls and gorgeous heraldries. In such a shape dost thou behold thy God.

Thou wilt not gash thy flesh for him; for thine

Fares richly, in fine linen, not a hair
Ruffled upon the scarfskin, even while
The deathless ruler of thy dying house
Is wounded to the death that cannot die;
And tho' thou numberest with the fol-
lowers

Of One who cried, "Leave all and follow

Had such a star of morning in their blue, That all neglected places of the field Broke into nature's music when they saw her.

Low was her voice, but won mysterious

way

Thro' the seal'd ear to which a louder one

Was all but silence hand

- free of alms her

The hand that robed your cottage-walls with flowers

Has often toil'd to clothe your little

ones;

And oaken finials till he touch'd the door;

Yet to the lychgate, where his chariot stood,

Strode from the porch, tall and erect again.

But nevermore did either pass the gate Save under pall with bearers. In one month,

Thro' weary and yet ever wearier hours, The childless mother went to seek her child;

And when he felt the silence of his house

About him, and the change and not the change,

And those fixt eyes of painted ancestors Staring for ever from their gilded walls On him their last descendant, his own head

Began to droop, to fall; the man became Imbecile; his one word was 'desolate; ' Dead for two years before his death was he;

But when the second Christmas came, escaped

His keepers, and the silence which he felt,

To find a deeper in the narrow gloom By wife and child; nor wanted at his end

The dark retinue reverencing death At golden thresholds; nor from tender hearts,

And those who sorrow'd o'er a vanish'd race,

Pity, the violet on the tyrant's grave. Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,

And the broad woodland parcell'd into farms;

And where the two contrived their daughter's good,

Lies the hawk's cast, the mole has made

his run,

The hedgehog underneath the plantain bores,

The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,

The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there

Follows the mouse, and all is open field.

But while the two were sleeping, a full tide

Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks

Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild seasmoke,

And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell

In vast sea-cataracts—ever and anon Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs

Heard thro' the living roar. At this the babe,

Their Margaret cradled near them, wail'd and woke

The mother, and the father suddenly cried, 'A wreck, a wreck!' then turn'd, and groaning said,

'Forgive! How many will say, "for-
give," and find

A sort of absolution in the sound
To hate a little longer! No; the sin
That neither God nor man can well for-
give,

Hypocrisy, I saw it in him at once.
Is it so true that second thoughts are best?
Not first, and third, which are a riper first?
Too ripe, too late! they come too late
for use.

Ah love, there surely lives in man and beast

Something divine to warn them of their foes:

And such a sense, when first I fronted him,

Said, "Trust him not;" but after, when I came

To know him more, I lost it, knew him less;

Fought with what seem'd my own uncharity;

Sat at his table; drank his costly wines; Made more and more allowance for his talk;

Went further, fool! and trusted him with all,

All my poor scrapings from a dozen years Of dust and deskwork: there is no such mine,

None; but a gulf of ruin, swallowing gold, Not making. Ruin'd! ruin'd! the sea

roars

Ruin: a fearful night!'