"To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends- "Farewell! farewell! but this I tell "He prayeth best who loveth best The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Is gone. And now the Wedding-Guest He went like one that hath been stunned, A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn. And to teach by his own example, love, and reverence to all things that God made and loveth. GENEVIEVE. ALL thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, Are all but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I The moonlight stealing o'er the scene, She leant against the armèd man, The statue of the armèd knight; She stood and listened to my lay, Amid the lingering light. Few sorrows hath she of her own, I played a soft and doleful air, I sang an old and moving story— An old rude song, that suited well That ruin wild and hoary. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes and modest grace, I told her of the knight that wore I told her how he pined, and—ah! She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes and modest grace, And she forgave me, that I gazed Too fondly on her face! But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night: That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once In green and sunny glade, There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a fiend, This miserable knight ! And that, unknowing what he did, And how she wept and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain— And ever strove to expiate The scorn that crazed his brain ; And that she nursed him in a cave; His dying words—but when I reached All impulses of soul and sense Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve ; The music and the doleful tale, The rich and balmy eve; And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, She wept with pity and delight, She blushed with love and virgin shame. And like the murmur of a dream, I heard her breathe my name. Her bosom heaved-she stept aside, She half enclosed me in her arms, She pressed me with a meek embrace : "Twas partly love and partly fear, I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And so I won my Genevieve, My own, my beauteous bride. WORK WITHOUT HOPE. ALL nature seems at work. Stags leave their lair— The bees are stirring-birds are on the wing And Winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, |