O joy to him, in this retreat,
İmmantled in ambrosial dark,

To drink the cooler air, and mark
The landscape winking through the heat!

O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep

of scythe in morning dew, The gust that round the garden flew, And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

O bliss, when all in circle drawn

About him, heart and ear were fed To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poets on the lawn:

Or in the all-golden afternoon

A guest, or happy sister, sung,

Or here she brought the harp, and flung

A ballad to the brightening moon:

Nor less it pleased, in livelier moods,

Beyond the bounding hill to stray. And break the livelong summer day With banquet in the distant woods;

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme, Discussed the books to love or hate, Or touched the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream;

But if I praised the busy town,

He loved to rail against it still,
For "ground in yonder social mill,

We rub each other's angles down,

"And merge," he said, "in form and gloss, The picturesque of man and man." We talked: the stream beneath us ran,

The wine-flask lying couched in moss,

Or cooled within the glooming wave,
And last, returning from afar,
Before the crimson-circled star
Had fallen into her father's grave,

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,

We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in the pail, And buzzings of the honeyed hours.

LXXXIX.

HE tasted love with half his mind,
Nor ever drank the inviolate spring
Where nighest heaven, who first could fling

This bitter seed among mankind;

That could the dead, whose dying eyes

Were closed with wail, resume their life, They would but find in child and wife An iron welcome when they rise :

'Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine, To pledge them with a kindly tear: To talk them over, to wish them here,

To count their memories half divine;

But if they came who passed away,

Behold their brides in other hands:
The hard heir strides about their lands,

And will not yield them for a day.

Yea, though their sons were none of these,
Not less the yet-loved sire would make
Confusion worse than death, and shake

The pillars of domestic peace.

Ah dear, but come thou back to me:

Whatever change the years have wrought,
I find not yet one lonely thought

That cries against my wish for thee.

XC.

WHEN rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplished years
Be large and lucid round thy brow.

When summer's hourly-mellowing change
May breathe with many roses sweet
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;

Come: not in watches of the night,

But where the sunbeam broodeth warm, Come, beauteous in thine after form, And like a finer light in light.

XCI.

IF any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain,
As but the canker of the brain;
Yea, though it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind

Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, though it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;

And though the months, revolving near, Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments,

And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.

XCII.

1 SHALL not see thee. Dare I say No spirit ever brake the band

That stays him from the native land Where first he walked when clasped in clay ?

No visual shade of some one lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb;

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

O, therefore from thy sightless range
With gods in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss

Of tenfold-complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame
My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

XCIII.

How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold,

Should be the man whose thought would
hold

An hour's communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,

My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast,
Imaginations calm and fair,

The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest:

But when the heart is full of din,

And doubt beside the portal waits, They can but listen at the gates, And hear the household jar within.

XCIV.

By night we lingered on the lawn,
For under foot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o'er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;

And calm that let the tapers burn

Unwavering: not a cricket chirred:
The brook alone far off was heard,
And on the board the fluttering urn:
And bats went round in fragrant skies,
And wheeled or lit the filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes

And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;

While now we sang old songs that pealed

From knoll to knoll, where, couched at ease,
The white kine glimmered, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field.

But when those others, one by one,

Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light

Went out, and I was all alone,

A hunger seized my heart;

I read

Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fallen leaves which kept their green,

The noble letters of the dead: