We see but dimly through the mists and vapours, What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers, There is no Death! What seems so is transition; is but a suburb of the life elysian, She is not dead,--the child of our affection,- Where she no longer needs our poor protection, In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, Day after day we think what she is doing Year after year, her tender steps pursuing, Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken, Not as a child shall we again behold her; For when with raptures wild In our embraces we again enfold her, She will not be a child; But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion And though at times impetuous with emotion The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean, We will be patient, and assuage the feeling We may not wholly stay; By silence sanctifying, not concealing, The grief that must have way. THE BUILDERS. ALL are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time: f... Nothing useless is, or low; For the structure that we raise, Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between ; In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care For the Gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen; Else our lives are incomplete, Shall to-morrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye SONNET ON MRS. KEMBLE'S READINGS FROM SHAKSPEARE. O PRECIOUS evenings! all too swiftly sped! Of all the best thoughts of the greatest sages, How our hearts glowed and trembled as she read, O happy Reader! having for thy text The magic book, whose Sibylline leaves have caught The rarest essence of all human thought! O happy Poet! by no critic vext! How must thy listening spirit now rejoice To be interpreted by such a voice! SAND OF THE DESERT IN AN HOUR-GLASS. A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, How many weary centuries has it been Perhaps the camels of the Ishmaelite When into Egypt from the patriarch's sight Perhaps the feet of Moses, burnt and bare, Or Pharaoh's flashing wheels into the air Or Mary, with the Christ of Nazareth Whose pilgrimage of hope and love and faith Or anchorites beneath Engaddi's palms And singing slow their old Armenian psalms Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate, These have passed over it, or may have passed! Imprisoned by some curious hand at last, It counts the passing hour. And as I gaze, these narrow walls expand;- Stretches the desert with its shifting sand, And bone aloft by the sustaining blast, Dilates into a column high and vast, And onward, and across the setting sun, The column and its broader shadow run, Till thought pursues in vain. The vision vanishes! These walls again Shut out the hot, immeasurable plain; BIRDS OF PASSAGE. BLACK shadows fall From the lindens tall, That lift aloft their massive wall And from the realms Of the shadowy elms A tide-like darkness overwhelms But the night is fair, And everywhere A warm, soft vapour fills the air, And distant sounds seem near; And above, in the light Of the star-lit night, Swift birds of passage wing their flight I hear the beat Of their pinions fleet, As from the land of snow and sleet They seek a southern lea. I hear the cry Of their voices high Falling dreamily through the sky, O, say not so! Those sounds that flow In murmurs of delight and woe Come not from wings of birds. They are the throngs Of the poet's songs, Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs, The sound of winged words. This is the cry Of souls, that high On toiling, beating pinions fly, From their distant flight It falls into our world of night, With the murmuring sound of rhyme. THE OPEN WINDOW. THE old house by the lindens The large Newfoundland housedog They walked not under the lindens, The birds sang in the branches, With sweet, familiar tone; But the voices of the children Will be heard in dreams alone! And the boy that walked beside me, Why closer in mine, ah! closer, PEGASUS IN POUND. ONCE into a quiet village, Without haste and without heed, In the golden prime of morning, Strayed the poet's wingèd steed. |