And the blackbird's tune,
And May, and June!

II.

What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands)———
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree 't is a cypress-stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands

To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day-the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
-She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!

Queen Mary's saying serves for me

(When fortune's malice

Lost her, Calais)

Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy."
Such lovers old are I and she:
So it always was, so shall ever be!

OH, to be in England

Now that April's there,

I.

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now!

II.

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops-at the bent spray's edge-
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA.

NOBLY, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz

Bay;

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest North-East distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;

"Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"—say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise

and pray,

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

SAUL.

I.

SAID Abner, "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak,

"Kiss my cheek, wish me well!" Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.

And he, "Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent,

"Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from

his tent

"Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth

yet,

"Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet.

"For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of

three days,

"Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of praise,

"To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife,

"And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life.

II.

"Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his dew

"On the gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue

"Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat

"Were now raging to torture the desert!"

III.

Then I, as was meet,

Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my

feet,

And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was

unlooped;

I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I

stooped;

Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone,

That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on

Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I prayed,

And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid

But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied.

At the first I saw nought but the blackness; but soon I descried

A something more black than the blackness-the vast, the upright

Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into

sight

Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof, showed

Saul.

IV.

He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched out wide

On the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side;

He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in

his pangs

And waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily

hangs,

Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance

come

With the spring-time, so agonized Saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb.

V.

Then I tuned my harp,-took off the lilies we twine round its chords

Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide-those sunbeams like swords!

And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one,

So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done.