Works

Life was unkind to him;
All things went wrong:
Fortune assigned to him
Merely a song.
Ever a mystery
Here to his heart;
In his life's history
Love played no part.
Carve on the granite,...

Two pretty rills do meet, and meeting make
Within one valley a large silver lake:
About whose banks the fertile mountains stood
In ages pass'd bravely crowned with wood,...

Poet, my master, come, tell me true,
And how are your verses made?
Ah! that is the easiest thing to do: -
You take a cloud of a silvern hue,
A tender smile or a sprig of rue,...

If I should quit thee, sacrifice, forswear,
To what, my art, shall I give thee in keeping?
To the long winds of heaven? Shall these come sweeping
My songs forgone against my face and hair?
...

I saw a tract of ocean locked in-land
Within a field's embrace -
The very sea! Afar it fled the strand
And gave the seasons chase,
And met the night alone, the tempest spanned,
Saw sunrise face to face....

I woo'd a woman once,
But she was sharper than an eastern wind.
- TENNYSON.

"What may I do to make you glad,
To make you glad and free,
Till your light smiles glance...

"Son of my buried Son, while thus thy hand"
"Is clasping mine, it saddens me to think"
"How Want may press thee down, and with thee sink"
"Thy children left unfit, through vain demand"...

Apollo, god of light and wit,
Could verse inspire, but seldom writ,
Refined all metals with his looks,
As well as chemists by their books;
As handsome as my lady's page;...

Ireland is now our royal care,
We lately fix'd our viceroy there.
How near was she to be undone,
Till pious love inspired her son!
What cannot our vicegerent do,
As poet and as patriot too?...

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size -
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,...

Those were fine times, when I still
Walked in silk socks and wore underpants,
Sometimes had ten marks to spare, in order
To hire a woman, bored in the day
Night after night I sat in the coffeehouse....

APPENDIX.

The following variations appear in the first two verses of Hector's
Farewell, as given in The Robbers, act ii. scene 2.


ANDROMACHE.
Wilt thou, Hector, leave me? leave me weeping,...

How shall I meet thee, Summer, wont to fill
My heart with gladness, when thy pleasant tide
First came, and on the Coomb's romantic side
Was heard the distant cuckoo's hollow bill!...

Parmi che spesso.


Ofttimes my great desire doth flatter me
With hope on earth yet many years to stay:
Still Death, the more I love it, day by day
Takes from the life I love so tenderly....

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning's back....

Carico d'anni.


Burdened with years and full of sinfulness,
With evil custom grown inveterate,
Both deaths I dread that close before me wait,
Yet feed my heart on poisonous thoughts no less.
...

Thou foldest me in sickness;
Thou callest through the cloud;
I batter with the thickness
Of the swathing, blinding shroud:
Oh, let me see thy face,
The only perfect grace...

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
...

Sol perch' tue bellezze.


If only that thy beauties here may be
Deathless through Time that rends the wreaths he twined,
I trust that Nature will collect and bind...

The poet's song, and the bird's,
And the waters' that chant as they run
And the waves' that kiss the beach,
And the wind's--they are but one.
He who may read their words,
And the secret hid in each,...