In one blind cry of passion and of pain,

Like bitter accusation ev'n to death,

Caught up the whole of love and utter'd it,

And bade adieu for ever.

Live-yet live

Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all

Life needs for life is possible to will—

Live happy; tend thy flowers; be tended by

My blessing! Should my Shadow cross thy

thoughts

Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou

For calmer hours to Memory's darkest hold,

If not to be forgotten-not at once

Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,
O might it come like one that looks content,
With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,
And point thee forward to a distant light,
Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart

And leave thee frëer, till thou wake refresh'd,

Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,

Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.

It was last summer on a tour in Wales:

Old James was with me: we that day had been
Up Snowdon; and I wish'd for Leonard there,
And found him in Llanberis: then we crost
Between the lakes, and clamber'd half way up
The counter side; and that same song of his
He told me; for I banter'd him, and swore
They said he lived shut up within himself,
A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days.

That, setting the how much before the how,

Cry, like the daughters of the horseleech, “Give,

Cram us with all," but count not me the herd!

To which "They call me what they will," he

said:

"But I was born too late: the fair new forms,

That float about the threshold of an age,

Like truths of Science waiting to be caught

Cátch me who can, and make the catcher

crown'd

Are taken by the forelock. Let it be.

But if you care indeed to listen, hear

These measured words, my work of yestermorn.

"We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things

move;

The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun;

The dark Earth follows wheel'd in her ellipse;

And human things returning on themselves

Move onward, leading up the golden year.

"Ah, tho' the times, when some new thought

can bud,

Are but as poets' seasons when they flower,

Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore,

Have ebb and flow conditioning their march,

And slow and sure comes up the golden year.

"When wealth no more shall rest in mounded

heaps,

But smit with frëer light shall slowly melt

In many streams to fatten lower lands,

And light shall spread, and man be liker man

Thro' all the season of the golden year.

"Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens?

If all the world were falcons, what of that?

The wonder of the eagle were the less,
But he not less the eagle. Happy days
Roll onward, leading up the golden year.