WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI.

CXCVII.

EMIGRATION.

WEAVE o'er the world your weft, yea weave yourselves,
Imperial races weave the warp thereof.

Swift like your shuttle speed the ships, and scoff
At wind and wave. And, as a miner delves
For hidden treasure bedded deep in stone,

So seek ye and find the treasure patriotism

In lands remote and dipped with alien chrism, And make those new lands heart-dear and your own. Weave o'er the world yourselves. Half-human man Wanes from before your faces like a cloud Sun-stricken, and his soil becomes his shroud. But of your souls and bodies ye shall make The sov'reign vesture of its leagueless span,

Clothing with history cliff and wild and lake.

CXCVIII.

AT LEMNOS.

ON this lone isle whose rugged rocks affright
The cautious pilot, ten revolving years

Great Pæan's son, unwonted erst to tears,

Wept o'er his wound; alike each rolling light
Of heaven he watched, and blamed its lingering flight ;
By day the sea-mew screaming round his cave
Drove slumber from his eyes; the chiding wave
And savage howlings chased his dreams by night.
Hope still was his in each low breeze that sighed

Through his low grot he heard a coming oar

In each white cloud a coming sail he spied;

Nor seldom listened to the fancied roar

Of Oeta's torrents, or the hoarser tide

That parts famed Trachis from the Euboic shore.

WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.

CXCIX.

THE UNIVERSE VOID.

REVOLVING Worlds, revolving systems, yea,
Revolving firmaments, nor there we end:
Systems of firmaments revolving, send
Our thought across the Infinite astray,
Gasping and lost and terrified, the day
Of life, the goodly interests of home,
Shrivelled to nothing; that unbounded dome
Pealing still on, in blind fatality.

No rest is there for our soul's wingèd feet,

She must return for shelter to her ark

The body, fair, frail, death-born, incomplete,

And let her bring this truth back from the dark:

Life is self-centred, man is nature's god;

Space, time, are but the walls of his abode.

CC.

BELOW THE OLD HOUSE.

BENEATH those buttressed walls with lichen grey,
Beneath the slopes of trees whose flickering shade
Darkens the pools by dun green velveted,

The stream leaps like a living thing at play,

In haste it seems: it cannot cannot stay!

The great boughs changing there from year to year,

And the high jackdaw-haunted eaves, still hear The burden of the rivulet-Passing away!

And some time certainly that oak no more

Will keep the winds in check; his breadth of beam Will go to rib some ship for some far shore;

Those coigns and eaves will crumble, while that stream Will still run whispering, whispering night and day, That oversong of Father Time-Passing away!

WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.

CCI.

PARTED LOVE.

METHINKS I have passed through some dreadful door, Shutting off summer and its sunniest glades

From a dark waste of marsh and ruinous shades:

And in that sunlit past, one day before

All other days is crimson to the core;

That day of days when hand in hand became

Encircling arms, and with an effluent flame

Of terrible surprise, we knew love's lore.

The rose-red ear that then my hand caressed,
Those smiles bewildered, that low voice so sweet,
The truant threads of silk about the brow
Dishevelled, when our burning lips were pressed
Together, and the temple-pulses beat!

All gone now-where am I, and where art thou?