VI

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,

And dear the last embraces of our wives

And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change;

For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten-years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile :
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labor unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot

stars.

VII

But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)

With half-dropt eyelids still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine —
To watch the emerald-color'd water falling
Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

VIII

The Lotos blooms beneath the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower

tone:

Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion

we,

Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foamfountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of man

kind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,

Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are

strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and

oil;

Till they perish and they suffer

whisper'd down in hell

some, 'tis

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander

more.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

HYLAS

DEAR to the sailor-kings,

Bronze-bearded, steadfast-hearted,

Oars' dash, when galley swings

Black through the grey waves parted.
But they said: "Make the cove
Where breathes a moonless grove,
And larks hang glad

O'er pebbly pools and sweet;
He sickens with the heat,
Our little lad."

So they call, the gold-browed kings,
Hylas, Hylas, Hylas! clear;
And Alcides' great voice rings,-
For he loved the brown child dear.

He left the blue profound

To follow winding valleys;
He lost the surf's faint sound
In aspen-shivering alleys.
Beside the freshes cold
He found white fingers hold
His brown hand hot;

The dark kings waited long,
But he came not.

Yet they call him from the shore,
Hylas, Hylas, Hylas! thrice;

But Alcides sails no more

Remembering the drowned child's eyes. Georgiana Goddard King

ORPHEUS

RPHEUS with his lute made trees

OR

And the mountain tops that freeze Bow themselves when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring.

Every thing that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,

Hung their heads and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,

Killing care and grief of heart

Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

Shakespeare?

FRO

HYMN OF PAN

ROM the forests and highlands
We come, we come;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
The cicale above in the lime,

And the lizards below in the grass,
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the nymphs of the wood and waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves. And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love,- as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings.