Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,
When all his active powers are still,
A distant dearness in the hill,
A secret sweetness in the stream,

The limit of his narrower fate,

While yet beside its vocal springs He played at counsellors and kings, With one that was his earliest mate;

Who ploughs with pain his native lea,
And reaps the labor of his hands,
Or in the furrow musing stands:
"Does my old friend remember me?"

LXIV.

SWEET Soul! do with me as thou wilt;
I lull a fancy trouble-tost

With "Love's too precious to be lost, A little grain shall not be spilt."

And in that solace can I sing,

Till out of painful phases wrought There flutters up a happy thought, Self-balanced on a lightsome wing;

Since we deserved the name of friends,
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee,
And move thee on to noble ends.

LXV.

You thought my heart too far diseased· You wonder when my fancies play, To find me gay among the gay,

Like one with any trifle pleased.

The shade by which my life was crossed, Which makes a desert in the mind, Has made me kindly with my kind, And like to him whose sight is lost;

Whose feet are guided through the land,
Whose jest among his friends is free,
Who takes the children on his knee,
And winds their curls about his hand;

He plays with threads, he beats his chair
For pastime, dreaming of the sky;
His inner day can never die,
His night of loss is always there.

LXVI.

WHEN on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest,
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:

Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.

The mystic glory swims away;

From off my bed the moonlight dies:
And closing eaves of wearied eyes

I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray :

And then I know the mist is drawn

A lucid veil from coast to coast,

And in the dark church like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

LXVII.

WHEN in the down I sink my head,
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my
breath;

Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not
Death,

Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

I walk as ere I walked forlorn,

When all our path was fresh with dew,
And all the bugle breezes blew

Reveillée to the breaking morn.

But what is this? I turn about,

I find a trouble in thine eye,

Which makes me sad, I know not why, Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:

But ere the lark hath left the lea

I wake, and I discern the truth; It is the trouble of my youth That foolish sleep transfers to thee

LXVIII.

I DREAMED there would be Spring no more,
That Nature's ancient power was lost :
The streets were black with smoke and frost,
They chattered trifles at the door.

I wandered from the noisy town,

I found a wood with thorny boughs;
I took the thorns to bind my brows,

I wore them like a civic crown.

I met with scoffs, I met with scorns,
From youth and babe and hoary hairs:
They called me in the public squares
The fool that wears a crown of thorns.

They called me fool, they called me child:
I found an angel of the night:

The voice was low, the look was bright. He looked upon my crown and smiled:

He reached the glory of a hand,

That seemed to touch it into leaf: The voice was not the voice of grief; The words were hard to understand.

LXIX.

I CANNOT see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint,
And mix with hollow masks of night;

Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
A hand that points, and palled shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

And crowds that stream from yawning doors,
And shoals of puckered faces drive;
Dark bulks that tumble half alive,
And lazy lengths on boundless shores:

Till all at once, beyond the will,
I hear a wizard music roll,
And through a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

LXX.

SLEEP, kinsman thou to death and trance And madness, thou hast forged at last A night-long Present of the Past

In which we went through summer France.

Hadst thou such credit with the soul?
Then bring an opiate trebly strong,
Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong
That so my pleasure may be whole;

While now we talk, as once we talked

Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old we walked

Beside the river's wooded reach,

The fortress, and the mountain ridge, The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach.

LXXI.

RISEST thou thus, dim dawn, again,
And howlest, issuing out of night,
With blasts that blow the poplar white,
And lash with storm the streaming pane?

Day, when my crowned estate begun
To pine in that reverse of doom,
Which sickened every living bloom,
And blurred the splendor of the sun;

Who usherest in the dolorous hour

With thy quick tears that make the rose
Pull sideways, and the daisy close

Her crimson fringes to the shower;

Who mightst have heaved a windless flame Up the deep East, or, whispering, played A checker-work of beam and shade

Along the hills, yet looked the same,