To hear, to heed, to wed,
And with thy lord depart
In tears that he, as soon as shed,
Will let no longer smart.
To hear, to heed, to wed,
This while thou didst I smiled, For now it was not God who said, "Mother, give ME thy child."
O fond, O fool, and blind,
To God I gave with tears;
But, when a man like grace would find, My soul put by her fears.
O fond, O fool, and blind,
God guards in happier spheres ; That man will guard where he did bind Is hope for unknown years.
To hear, to heed, to wed,
Fair lot that maidens choose,
Thy mother's tenderest words are said,
Thy face no more she views;
Thy mother's lot, my dear,
She doth in naught accuse;
Her lot to bear, to nurse, to rear,
To love and then to lose.
LIKE A LAVEROCK IN THE LIFT.
It's we two, it's we two for aye,
All the world, and we two, and Heaven be our stay!
Like a laverock in the lift,† sing, O bonny
NOT OURS THE VOWS.
NOT ours the vows of such as plight
Their troth in sunny weather, While leaves are green, and skies are bright, To walk on flowers together.
But we have loved as those who tread
The thorny path of sorrow,
With clouds above, and cause to dread
Yet deeper gloom to-morrow.
That thorny path, those stormy skies,
Have drawn our spirits nearer;
And rendered us, by sorrow's ties,
Each to the other dearer.
Love, born in hours of joy and mirth,
With mirth and joy may perish ;
That to which darker hours gave birth
Still more and more we cherish.
FROM "PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE."
SHE was a creature framed by love divine
All the world was Adam once, with Eve by his For mortal love to muse a life away
In pondering her perfections; so unmoved Amidst the world's contentions, if they touched
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To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,
To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast.
O, speak the joy! ye whom the sudden tear
Surprises often, while you look around,
And nothing strikes your eye but sights of bliss,
All various nature pressing on the heart;
An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven.
These are the matchless joys of virtuous love ;
And thus their moments fly. The Seasons thus,
As ceaseless round a jarring world they roll,
Still find them happy; and consenting Spring
Sheds her own rosy garland on their heads:
Till evening comes at last, serene and mild;
When after the long vernal day of life,
Enamored more, as more remembrance swells
With many a proof of recollected love,
Together down they sink in social sleep;
Together freed, their gentle spirits fly
To scenes where love and bliss immortal reign.
JAMES THOMSON.
FROM "THE SEASONS: SPRING.'
BUT happy they! the happiest of their kind! Whom gentler stars unite, and in one fate Their hearts, their fortunes, and their beings
'T is not the coarser tie of human laws,
Unnatural oft, and foreign to the mind,
That binds their peace, but harmony itself,
Attuning all their passions into love;
Where friendship full-exerts her softest power,
Perfect esteem enlivened by desire
Ineffable, and sympathy of soul;
Thought meeting thought, and will preventing
will,
With boundless confidence: for naught but love
Can answer love, and render bliss secure.
Meantime a smiling offspring rises round,
And mingles both their graces. By degrees,
The human blossom blows; and every day,
Soft as it rolls along, shows some new charm,
The father's lustre and the mother's bloom.
Then infant reason grows apace, and calls
For the kind hand of an assiduous care.
Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,
MY WIFE'S A WINSOME WEE THING. But rather raised to be a nobler man,
And more divine in my humanity,
As knowing that the waiting eyes which scan
My life are lighted by a purer being,
And ask meek, calm-browed deeds, with it agree-
ing.
OUR love is not a fading, earthly flower :
Its winged seed dropped down from Paradise,
And, nursed by day and night, by sun and
shower,
Doth momently to fresher beauty rise :
To us the leafless autumn is not bare,
Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green.
Our summer hearts make summer's fulness, where
No leaf, or bud, or blossom may be seen :
For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie,
Love, whose forgetfulness is beauty's death,
Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I
Into the infinite freedom openeth,
And makes the body's dark and narrow grate
The wind-flung leaves of Heaven's palace-gate.
My Love, I have no fear that thou shouldst die; I THOUGHT our love at full, but I did err;
Albeit I ask no fairer life than this,
Whose numbering-clock is still thy gentle kiss,
While Time and Peace with hands unlockèd fly,-
Yet care I not where in Eternity
We live and love, well knowing that there is
No backward step for those who feel the bliss
Of Faith as their most lofty yearnings high:
Love hath so purified my being's core,
Meseems I scarcely should be startled, even,
To find, some morn, that thou hadst gone before;
Since, with thy love, this knowledge too was
given,
Which each calm day doth strengthen more and
That they who love are but one step from Heaven.
I CANNOT think that thou shouldst pass away,
Whose life to mine is an eternal law,
A piece of nature that can have no flaw,
A new and certain sunrise every day;
But, if thou art to be another ray
About the Sun of Life, and art to live
Free from all of thee that was fugitive,
The debt of Love I will more fully pay,
Joy's wreath drooped o'er mine eyes; I could not
That sorrow in our happy world must be
Love's deepest spokesman and interpreter.
But, as a mother feels her child first stir
Under her heart, so felt I instantly
Deep in my soul another bond to thee
Thrill with that life we saw depart from her;
O mother of our angel child! twice dear!
Death knits as well as parts, and still, I wis,
Her tender radiance shall infold us here,
Even as the light, borne up by inward bliss,
Threads the void glooms of space without a fear,
To print on farthest stars her pitying kiss.
O FAIREST of creation, last and best
Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!
Not downcast with the thought of thee so high, Rather, how hast thou yielded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred fruit forbidden! Some cursèd fraud
Of enemy hath beguiled thee, yet unknown,
And me with thee hath ruined, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die.
How can I live without thee, how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
bring us your vices so near
That we smell them! you think in our presence a thought 't would defame us to hear!
"What reason had you, and what right, I
appeal to your soul from my life,
To find me too fair as a woman? Why, sir, I
am pure, and a wife.
"Is the day-star too fair up above you? It
burns you not.
Dare you imply
I brushed you more close than the star does,
when Walter had set me as high?
"If a man finds a woman too fair, he means
simply adapted too much
To uses unlawful and fatal. The praise !-- shall
I thank you for such?
"Too fair? not unless you misuse us! and surely if, once in a while,
│I value your husband, Lord Walter, whose gallop You attain to it, straightway you call us no
rings still from the limes."
"0, that," she said, "is no reason. You smell a rose through a fence:
If two should smell it, what matter? who grumbles, and where's the pretence?"
"But I," he replied, "have promised another, when love was free,
To love her alone, alone, who alone and afar loves me."
longer too fair, but too vile.
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