Yet who had done, or who had suffer'd wrong?

And why was I to darken their pure love,

If, as I found, they two did love each other,

Because my own was darken'd? Why was I

To cross between their happy star and them?

To stand a shadow by their shining doors,

And vex them with my darkness? Did I love her?

Ye know that I did love her; to this present

My full-orb'd love has waned not. Did I love her,

And could I look upon her tearful eyes?

What had she done to weep? Why should she weep?

O innocent of spirit—let my heart Break rather-whom the gentlest airs of Heaven

Should kiss with an unwonted gentle

Borne into alien lands and far away.

There be some hearts so airily built, that they,

They

when their love is wreck'dif Love can wreck

Above the perilous seas of Change and Chance;

Nay, more, hold out the lights of cheerfulness;

As the tall ship, that many a dreary year

Knit to some dismal sandbank far at sea,

All thro' the livelong hours of utter dark,

Showers slanting light upon the dolor

ous wave.

For me what light, what gleam on those black ways

Where Love could walk with banish'd Hope no more?

It was ill-done to part you, Sisters fair;

Love's arms were wreath'd about the neck of Hope,

And Hope kiss'd Love, and Love drew in her breath

In that close kiss, and drank her whisper'd tales.

They said that Love would die when Hope was gone,

And Love mourn'd long, and sorrow'd after Hope;

At last she sought out Memory, and they trod

The same old paths where Love had walk'd with Hope,

And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.

ride highly

The meaning of the letters shot into

Came wooingly with woodbine smells Sometimes

All day I sat within the cavern-mouth, Fixing my eyes on those three cypress

cones

That spired above the wood; and with mad hand

Tearing the bright leaves of the ivyscreen,

I cast them in the noisy brook be. neath,

And watch'd them till they vanish'd from my sight

Beneath the bower of wreathed eglan. tines :

And all the fragments of the living rock

(Huge blocks, which some old trem. bling of the world

Had loosen'd from the mountain, till they fell

Half-digging their own graves) these in my agony

Did I make bare of all the golden

Embathing all with wild and woful hues,

Great hills of ruins, and collapsed

masses

Of thundershaken columns indistinct, And fused together in the tyrannous light

Ruins, the ruin of all my life and me!

Sometimes I thought Camilla was

no more,

Some one had told me she was dead, and ask'd

If I would see her burial: then I seem'd To rise, and through the forest-shadow borne

With more than mortal swiftness, I ran down

The steepy sea-bank, till I came upon The rear of a procession, curving round The silver-sheeted bay: in front of which

Six stately virgins, all in white, upbear A broad earth-sweeping pall of whitest lawn,

Wreathed round the bier with garlands in the distance, From out the yellow woods upon the hill

Look'd forth the summit and the pinnacles

Of a gray steeple - thence at intervals A low bell tolling. All the pageantry, Save those six virgins which upheld the bier,

Were stoled from head to foot in flowing black;

One walk'd abreast with me, and veil'd his brow,

And he was loud in weeping and in

The very face and form of Lionel Flash'd thro' my eyes into my innermost brain,

And at his feet I seem'd to faint and fall,

To fall and die away. I could not rise Albeit I strove to follow. They past

on,

The lordly Phantasms! in their floating folds

They past and were no more: but I had fallen

Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass.

Alway the inaudible invisible thought,

Artificer and subject, lord and slave,
Shaped by the audible and visible,
Moulded the audible and visible;
All crisped sounds of wave and leaf
and wind,

Flatter'd the fancy of my fading brain; The cloud-pavilion'd element, the wood,

The mountain, the three cypresses, the

cave,

Storm, sunset, glows and glories of the moon

Below black firs, when silent-creeping winds

Laid the long night in silver streaks and bars,

Were wrought into the tissue of my dream:

The moanings in the forest, the loud brook,

Cries of the partridge like a rusty key Turn'd in a lock, owl-whoop and dorhawk-whirr

Awoke me not, but were a part of

sleep,

And voices in the distance calling to me And in my vision bidding me dream on, Like sounds without the twilight realm

of dreams,

Which wander round the bases of the hills,

And murmur at the low-dropt eaves of sleep,

Half-entering the portals. Oftentimes The vision had fair prelude, in the end

Opening on darkness, stately vesti

bules

To caves and shows of Death: whether the mind,

With some revenge. -even to itself unknown,

Made strange division of its suffering With her, whom to have suffering view'd had been

Extremest pain; or that the clear-eyed Spirit,

Being blunted in the Present, grew at length

Prophetical and prescient of whate'er The Future had in store: or that

which most Enchains belief, the sorrow of my spirit

Was of so wide a compass it took in All I had loved, and my dull agony, Ideally to her transferr'd, became Anguish intolerable.

Hung round with paintings of the sea, and one

A vessel in mid-ocean, her heaved prow

Clambering, the mast bent and the ravin wind

In her sail roaring. From the outer day,

Betwixt the close-set ivies came a broad

And solid beam of isolated light, Crowded with driving atomies, and fell

Slanting upon that picture, from prime youth

Well-known well-loved. She drew it long ago

Forthgazing on the waste and open

sea,

One morning when the upblown billow ran

Shoreward beneath red clouds, and I had pour'd

Into the shadowing pencil's naked forms

Color and life: it was a bond and seal Of friendship, spoken of with tearful smiles;

A monument of childhood and of

love;

The poesy of childhood; my lost love