Save under pall with bearers. In one month, Thro' weary and yet ever wearier hours,

The childless mother went to seek her child;

And when he felt the silence of his house

About him, and the change and not the change,
And those fixt eyes of painted ancestors
Staring for ever from their gilded walls

On him their last descendant, his own head
Began to droop, to fall; the man became
Imbecile; his one word was 'desolate ' ;
Dead for two years before his death was he;
But when the second Christmas came, escaped
His keepers, and the silence which he felt,

To find a deeper in the narrow gloom

By wife and child; nor wanted at his end
The dark retinue reverencing death

At golden thresholds; nor from tender hearts,
And those who sorrow'd o'er a vanish'd race,
Pity, the violet on the tyrant's grave.

Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,

And the broad woodland parcell'd into farms;

And where the two contrived their daughter's good,

Lies the hawk's cast, the mole has made his run,

The hedgehog underneath the plantain bores,

The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,

The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there

Follows the mouse, and all is open field.

SEA DREAMS.

A CITY clerk, but gently born and bred;

His wife, an unknown artist's orphan child—

One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:

They, thinking that her clear germander eye

Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,

Came, with a month's leave given them, to the sea :
For which his gains were dock'd, however small :
Small were his gains, and hard his work; besides,
Their slender household fortunes (for the man

Had risk'd his little) like the little thrift,
Trembled in perilous places o'er a deep :

And oft, when sitting all alone, his face

Would darken, as he cursed his credulousness,

And that one unctuous mouth which lured him, rogue,

To buy strange shares in some Peruvian mine.

Now seaward-bound for health they gain'd a coast,

All sand and cliff and deep-inrunning cave,

At close of day; slept, woke, and went the next,
The Sabbath, pious variers from the church,
To chapel; where a heated pulpiteer,

Not preaching simple Christ to simple men,
Announced the coming doom, and fulminated
Against the scarlet woman and her creed:

For sideways up he swung his arms, and shriek'd
'Thus, thus with violence,' ev'n as if he held
The Apocalyptic millstone, and himself

Then comes the close.' The gentle-hearted wife

Sat shuddering at the ruin of a world ;

He at his own: but when the wordy storm

Had ended, forth they came and paced the shore,

H

Ran in and out the long sea-framing caves,

Drank the large air, and saw, but scarce believed (The sootflake of so many a summer still

Clung to their fancies) that they saw, the sea.

So now on sand they walk'd, and now on cliff,
Lingering about the thymy promontories,

Till all the sails were darken'd in the west,

And rosed in the east: then homeward and to bed :

Where she, who kept a tender Christian hope

Haunting a holy text, and still to that

Returning, as the bird returns, at night,

'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,'

Said, 'Love, forgive him :' but he did not speak ; And silenced by that silence lay the wife,

Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,

And musing on the little lives of men,

And how they mar this little by their feuds.

But while the two were sleeping, a full tide

Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks