Works

This sentence have I left behind:
An aching body, and a mind
Not wholly clear, nor wholly blind,
Too keen to rest, too weak to find,
That travails sore, and brings forth wind,...

I

SENDING

So on the floor lay Balder dead; and round
Lay thickly strewn swords axes darts and spears
Which all the Gods in sport had idly thrown
At Balder, whom no weapon pierc'd or clove:...

For him who must see many years,
I praise the life which slips away
Out of the light and mutely; which avoids
Fame, and her less fair followers, envy, strife,
Stupid detraction, jealousy, cabal,...

In the bare midst of Anglesey they show
Two springs which close by one another play,
And, 'Thirteen hundred years agone,' they say,
'Two saints met often where those waters flow.
...

'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited....

PERSONS:
EMPEDOCLES.
PAUSANIAS, a Physician.
CALLICLES, a young Harp-player.

The Scene of the Poem is on Mount Etna; at first in the forest region,
afterwards on the summit of the mountain.
...

One Morn as through Hyde Park we walk'd.
My friend and I, by chance we talk'd
Of Lessing's famed Laoco'n;
And after we awhile had gone
In Lessing's track, and tried to see
What painting is, what poetry,...

I too have suffer'd: yet I know
She is not cold, though she seems so:
She is not cold, she is not light;
But our ignoble souls lack might.

She smiles and smiles, and will not sigh,...

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;
...

Omit, omit, my simple friend,
Still to inquire how parties tend,
Or what we fix with foreign powers.
If France and we are really friends,
And what the Russian Czar intends,
Is no concern of ours.
...

In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.
...

And the first grey of morning fill'd the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.
But all the Tartar camp along the stream
Was hush'd, and still the men were plunged in sleep;...

I saw him sensitive in frame,
I knew his spirits low;
And wish'd him health, success, and fame:
I do not wish it now.

For these are all their own reward,
And leave no good behind;...

I

THE LAST GLEN

Hist! once more!
Listen, Pausanias! Aye, 'tis Callicles!
I know those notes among a thousand. Hark!

CALLICLES

(Sings unseen, from below.)...

And you, ye stars,
Who slowly begin to marshal,
As of old, in the fields of heaven,
Your distant, melancholy lines!
Have you, too, survived yourselves?
Are you, too, what I fear to become?...

Artist, whose hand, with horror wing'd, hath torn
From the rank life of towns this leaf: and flung
The prodigy of full-blown crime among
Valleys and men to middle fortune born,...

'O monstrous, dead, unprofitable world,
That thou canst hear, and hearing, hold thy way.
A voice oracular hath peal'd to-day,
To-day a hero's banner is unfurl'd.
Hast thou no lip for welcome?' So I said....