Works

I set out for the Land of Content,
By the gay crowded pleasure-highway,
With laughter, and jesting, I went
With the mirth-loving throng for a day;
Then I knew I had wandered astray,...

Awake, awake, my little boy!
Thou wast thy mother's only joy;
Why dost thou weep in thy gentle sleep?
Awake! thy father does thee keep.

"O, what land is the Land of Dreams?...

("L'Orient! qu'y voyez-vous, po'tes?")

[PRELUDE, b.]


Now, vot'ries of the Muses, turn your eyes,
Unto the East, and say what there appears!
"Alas!" the voice of Poesy replies,...

If all must suffer equally, and pay
In equal share for that sin wrought by Eve,
O Thou, if Thou wilt deign to answer, say:
Why are the poor tormented? why made grieve
The innocent? why are the free enslaved?...

Do you know the way that goes
Over fields of rue and rose,
Warm of scent and hot of hue,
Roofed with heaven's bluest blue,
To the Vale of Dreams Come True?

Do you know the path that twines,...

I


So we had come at last, my soul and I,
Into that land of shadowy plain and peak,
On which the dawn seemed ever about to break
On which the day seemed ever about to die.


II...

Now while the crimson light fades in the west,
And twilight drops her purple shadows low -
We stand with Memory on the mountain's crest,
That overlooks the land of Long Ago.
...

Hail! voyagers, hail!
Whence e'er ye come, where'er ye rove,
No calmer strand,
No sweeter land,
Will e'er ye view, than the Land of Love!

Hail! voyagers, hail!...

Methought I journeyed along ways that led for ever
Throughout a happy land where strife and care were dead,
And life went by me flowing like a placid river
Past sandy eyots where the shifting shoals make head....

Oh! that is a beautiful land I wis,
The land of the Gone-Away Souls.
Yes, a lovelier region by far than this
(Though this is a world most fair),
The goodliest goal of all good goals,...

I glory in the sages
Who, in the days of yore,
In combat met the foemen,
And drove them from our shore.
Who flung our banner's starry field
In triumph to the breeze,...

You and your landscape! There it lies
Stripped, resuming its disguise,
Clothed in dreams, made bare again,
Symbol infinite of pain,
Rapture, magic, mystery
Of vanished days and days to be....

I stood on the Land's End, alone and still.
Man might have been unmade, for no frail trace
Of mortal labour startled the wild place,
And only sea-mews with their wailing shrill,...

(DEDICATED TO HERMAN ANKER AND M. ANKER ON THE OCCASION OF THEIR SILVER-WEDDING, SEPTEMBER 15, 1888)
(See Note 75)

Land that shall be
Thither, when thwarted our longings, we sail, -...

Land of the gentle and brave!
Our love is as wide as thy woe;
It deepens beside every grave
Where the heart of a hero lies low.

Land of the sunniest skies!
Our love glows the more for thy gloom;...

The ladye she stood at her lattice high,
Wi' her doggie at her feet;
Thorough the lattice she can spy
The passers in the street,

"There's one that standeth at the door,
And tirleth at the pin:...

Below the braes o' heather, and far alang the glen,
The road rins southward, southward, that grips the souls o' men,
That draws their fitsteps aye awa' frae hearth and frae fauld,...

Fly swift, my light gazelle,
To her who now lies waking,
To hear thy silver bell
The midnight silence breaking.
And, when thou com'st, with gladsome feet,
Beneath her lattice springing,...

Oh! he was a student of mystic lore;
And she was a soulful girl
All nerves and mind, of the cultured kind
The paragon, pride, and pearl.

They loved with a neo-Concordic love,...

Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
...