Works

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference...

"There!" said a Stripling, pointing with meet pride
Towards a low roof with green trees half concealed,
"Is Mosgiel Farm; and that's the very field
Where Burns ploughed up the Daisy." Far and wide...

When you're lying in your hammock, sleeping soft and sleeping sound,
Without a care or trouble on your mind,
And there's nothing to disturb you but the engines going round,...

There's a regret
So grinding, so immitigably sad,
Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad . . .
Do you not know it yet?

For deeds undone
Rankle and snarl and hunger for their due,...

To a Gaelic Air.


I.

There's a youth in this city,
It were a great pity
That he frae our lasses shou'd wander awa:
For he's bonnie an' braw,
Weel-favour'd an' a',...

There's been a death in the opposite house
As lately as to-day.
I know it by the numb look
Such houses have alway.

The neighbors rustle in and out,
The doctor drives away....

There's a sudden, fierce clang of the knocker, then the sound of a voice in the shaft,
Shrieking words that drum hard on the centres, and the braceman goes suddenly daft:...

---- vo cercand' io,
Donna quant' e possibile in altrui
La desiata vostra forma vera.
PETRARC, Sonett. 14.


Yes, if 'twere any common love,
That led my pliant heart astray,...

There's joy when the rosy morning floods
The purple east with light,
When the zephyr sweeps from a thousand buds
The pearly tears of night.
There's joy when the lark exulting springs...

There's naethin like the honest nappy!
Whaur'll ye e'er see men sae happy,
Or women, sonsie, saft an' sappy,
'Tween morn an' morn
As them wha like to taste the drappie
In glass or horn?
...

Tune - "Green grow the rashes."


Chorus.

Green grow the rashes, O!
Green grow the rashes, O!
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend
Are spent amang the lasses, O.

I.
...

In Imitation of An Old English Poem


My wayward fate I needs must plain,
Though bootless be the theme;
I loved, and was beloved again,
Yet all was but a dream:...

Since Reverend Doctors now declare
That clerks and people must prepare
To doubt if Adam ever were;
To hold the flood a local scare;
To argue, though the stolid stare,
That everything had happened ere...

There's something strange, I know not what,
Come o'er me,
Some phantom I've for ever got
Before me.
I look on high and in the sky
'Tis shining;
On earth, its light with all things bright...

INGOLDSBY.



Year by year do Beauty's daughters,
In the sweetest gloves and shawls,
Troop to taste the Chattenham waters,
And adorn the Chattenham balls.

'Nulla non donanda lauru'...

Acquaintance; companion;
One dear brilliant woman;
The best-endowed, the elect,
All by their youth undone,
All, all, by that inhuman
Bitter glory wrecked.
But I have straightened out...

I thought I had forever lost,
Alas, though still so young,
The tender joys and sorrows all,
That unto youth belong;

The sufferings sweet, the impulses
Our inmost hearts that warm;...

That Christ did die, the pagan saith;
But that He rose, that's Christians' faith.

Gratefully inscribed to Dr. A.B. Grosart.



Sweet song-flower of the Mayspring of our song,
Be welcome to us, with loving thanks and praise
To his good hand who travelling on strange ways...

Her hands are filled with what I lack,
And on her arms are pictures,
Looking like files of ants forsaking the battalions,
Or hail inlaid by broken clouds on green lawns.
...