XVIII. 'Tis well, 't is something, we may stand 'Tis little; but it looks in truth As if the quiet bones were blest Among familiar names to rest And in the places of his youth. Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead. Ah! yet, even yet, if this might be, I, falling on his faithful heart, Would breathing through his lips impart The life that almost dies in me: That dies not, but endures with pain, And slowly forms the firmer mind, Treasuring the look it cannot find, The words that are not heard again. THE Danube to the Severn gave The darkened heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a day the Severn fills, The salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills. The Wye is hushed nor moved along; I brim with sorrow drowning song. The tide flows down, the wave again And I can speak a little then. XX. THE lesser griefs that may be said, Are but as servants in a house Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fulness from the mind: "It will be hard," they say, "to find Another service such as this." My lighter moods are like to these, For by the hearth the children sit Cold in that atmosphere of Death, And scarce endure to draw the breath, Or like to noiseless phantoms flit: |