Works

(To James Russell Lowell.)


Not from the ranks of those we call
Philosopher or Admiral,--
Neither as LOCKE was, nor as BLAKE,
Is that Great Genius for whose sake
We keep this Autumn festival....

"Nec turpem senectam
Degere, nec cithara carentem."
--Hor. i. 31.


"Not to be tuneless in old age!"
Ah! surely blest his pilgrimage,
Who, in his Winter's snow,...

(Published at Madrid, by Francisco de Robles, January 1605)

"Para mi sola nacio don Quixote, y yo para el."--CERVANTES.


Advents we greet of great and small;
Much we extol that may not live;...

"Mine be a cot," for the hours of play,
Of the kind that is built by MISS GREENAWAY;
Where the walls are low, and the roofs are red,
And the birds are gay in the blue o'erhead;...

Just for a space that I met her--
Just for a day in the train!
It began when she feared it would wet her,
That tiniest spurtle of rain:
So we tucked a great rug in the sashes,...

HUGH (on furlough).
HELEN (his cousin).


HELEN.

They have not come! And ten is past,--
Unless, by chance, my watch is fast;
--Aunt Mabel surely told us "ten."

HUGH.
...

"The blue fly sung in the pane."--Tennyson.


Toiling in Town now is "horrid,"
(There is that woman again!)--
June in the zenith is torrid,
Thought gets dry in the brain.
...

In our hearts is the Great One of Avon
Engraven,
And we climb the cold summits once built on
By Milton.

But at times not the air that is rarest
Is fairest,
And we long in the valley to follow...

"--the music of the moon
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale."
Aylmer's Field.


Five geese,--a landscape damp and wild,--
A stunted, not too pretty, child,
Beneath a battered gingham;...

"Little Blue-Ribbons!" We call her that
From the ribbons she wears in her favourite hat;
For may not a person be only five,
And yet have the neatest of taste alive?--
As a matter of fact, this one has views...

"Now the Graces are four and the Venuses two,
And ten is the number of Muses;
For a Muse and a Grace and a Venus are you,--
My dear little Molly Trefusis!"

...

They dwell in the odour of camphor,
They stand in a Sheraton shrine,
They are "warranted early editions,"
These worshipful tomes of mine;--

In their creamiest "Oxford vellum,"...

(After Anthony Hamilton.)

To G. S.


She that I love is neither brown nor fair,
And, in a word her worth to say,
There is no maid that with her may
Compare.
...

(HORACE, III. 7.)

"Quid fles, Asterie, quem tibi candidi
Primo restituent vere Favonii--
Gygen?"


Come, Laura, patience. Time and Spring
Your absent Arthur back shall bring,...

Him best in all the dim Arthuriad,
Of lovers of fair women, him I prize,--
The Pagan Palomydes. Never glad
Was he with sweetness of his lady's eyes,
Nor joy he had.
...

To One who asked why he wrote it.


You ask me what was his intent?
In truth, I'm not a German;
'Tis plain though that he neither meant
A Lecture nor a Sermon.
...

Old Loves and old dreams,--
"Requiescant in pace."
How strange now it seems,--
"Old" Loves and "old" dreams!
Yet we once wrote you reams
Maude, Alice, and Gracie!
Old Loves and old dreams,--...

In the year Seventeen Hundred and Seventy and Three,
When the GEORGES were ruling o'er Britain the free,
There was played a new play, on a new-fashioned plan,...

Even as one in city pent,
Dazed with the stir and din of town,
Drums on the pane in discontent,
And sees the dreary rain come down,
Yet, through the dimmed and dripping glass,...

(To E. G., With A Collection Of Essays.)


When You and I have wandered beyond the reach of call,
And all our Works immortal lie scattered on the Stall,
It may be some new Reader, in that remoter age,...