V.

TO VITTORIA COLONNA.

LADY, how can it chance yet this we see
In long experience that will longer last
A living image carved from quarries vast
Than its own maker, who dies presently?
Cause yieldeth to effect if this so be,

And even Nature is by Art surpassed;
This know I, who to Art have given the past,
But see that Time is breaking faith with me.
Perhaps on both of us long life can I

Either in color or in stone bestow,

By now portraying each in look and mien; So that a thousand years after we die,

How fair thou wast, and I how full of woe, And wherefore I so loved thee, may be seen.

VI.

TO VITTORIA COLONNA.

WHEN the prime mover of my many sighs Heaven took through death from out her earthly place,

Nature, that never made so fair a face,

Remained ashamed, and tears were in all eyes. O fate, unheeding my impassioned cries!

O hopes fallacious! O thou spirit of grace, Where art thou now? Earth holds in its embrace Thy lovely limbs, thy holy thoughts the skies. Vainly did cruel death attempt to stay

The rumor of thy virtuous renown, That Lethe's waters could not wash away! A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down, Speak of thee, nor to thee could Heaven convey, Except through death, a refuge and a crown.

VII.

DANTE.

WHAT should be said of him cannot be said;
By too great splendor is his name attended;
To blame is easier those who him offended,
Than reach the faintest glory round him shed.
This man descended to the doomed and dead
For our instruction; then to God ascended;
Heaven opened wide to him its portals splen
did,

Who from his country's, closed against him, fled.

Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice

Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well
That the most perfect most of grief shall see.
Among a thousand proofs let one suffice,
That as his exile hath no parallel,

Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.

VIII.

CANZONE.

АH me! ah me! when thinking of the years,
The vanished years, alas, I do not find
Among them all one day that was my own!
Fallacious hopes, desires of the unknown,
Lamenting, loving, burning, and in tears,
(For human passions all have stirred my mind),
Have held me, now I feel and know, contined
Both from the true and good still far away.
I perish day by day;

The sunshine fails, the shadows grow more dreary,

And I am near to fall, infirm and weary.

DEDICATION.

TO G. W. G.

WITH favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.

How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth.
The lost Atlantis of our youth!

Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Hebrides,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while

We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.

BAYARD TAYLOR.

DEAD he lay among his books!
The peace of God was in his looks.

As the statues in the gloom
Watch o'er Maximilian's tomb,1

So those volumes from their shelves
Watched him, silent as themselves.

Ah! his hand will nevermore
Turn their storied pages o'er;

Nevermore his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet.

Let the lifeless body rest!
He is gone, who was its guest;
Gone, as travellers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.

Traveller! in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,
In what vast, aerial space,
Shines the light upon thy face?

In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet to-night?

Poet! thou, whose latest verse
Was a garland on thy hearse;

Thou hast sung, with organ tone,
In Deukalion's life, thine own;

On the ruins of the Past
Blooms the perfect flower at last.
Friend! but yesterday the bells
Rang for thee their loud farewells;

And to-day they toll for thee,
Lying dead beyond the sea;

Lying dead among thy books,
The peace of God in all thy looks.

1 In the Hofkirche at Innsbruck.

THE CHAMBER OVER THE GATE

Is it so far from thee

Thou canst no longer see,
In the Chamber over the Gate,
That old man desolate,
Weeping and wailing sore
For his son, who is no more?
O Absalom, my son !

Is it so long ago

That cry of human woe
From the walled city came,
Calling on his dear name,
That it has died away
In the distance of to-day?
O Absalom, my son!

There is no far or near,

There is neither there nor here,
There is neither soon nor late,
In that Chamber over the Gate,
Nor any long ago

To that cry of human woe,
O Absalom, my son!

From the ages that are past
The voice sounds like a blast,
Over seas that wreck and drown,
Over tumult of traflic and town;
And from ages yet to be
Come the echoes back to me,
O Absalom, my son!

Somewhere at every hour
The watchman on the tower
Looks forth. and sees the fleet
Approach of the hurrying feet
Of messengers, that bear
The tidings of despair.

O Absalom, my son!

He goes forth from the door,
Who shall return no more.
With him our joy departs;
The light goes out in our hearts;
In the Chamber over the Gate
We sit disconsolate.

O Absalom, my son!

That 't is a common grief
Bringeth but slight relief;
Ours is the bitterest loss,
Ours is the heaviest cross;
And forever the cry will be,
"Would God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son!"

FROM MY ARM-CHAIR.

TO THE CHILDREN OF CAMBRIDGE,

Who presented to me, on my Seventy-second Birthday, February 27, 1879, this Chair made from the Wood of the Village Blacksmith's Chestnut-Tree.

Am I a king, that I should call my own
This splendid ebon throne?

Or by what reason, or what right divine,
Can I proclaim it mine?

Only, perhaps, by right divine of song
It may to me belong;

Only because the spreading chestnut-tree
Of old was sung by ine.

And when the winds of autumn, with a shout, Tossed its great arms about,

The shining chestnuts, bursting from the sheath, Dropped to the ground beneath.

And now some fragments of its branches bare, Shaped as a stately chair,

Have by my hearthstone found a home at last,
And whisper of the past.

The Danish king could not in all his pride
Repel the ocean tide,

But, seated in this chair, I can in rhyme
Roll back the tide of Time.

I see again, as one in vision sees,

The blossoms and the bees,

And hear the children's voices shout and call, And the brown chestnuts fall.

I see the smithy with its fires aglow,
I hear the bellows blow,

And the shrill hammers on the anvil beat
The iron white with heat!

And thus, dear children, have ye made for me This day a jubilee,

And to my more than three-score years and ten Brought back my youth again.

The heart hath its own memory, like the mind, And in it are enshrined

The precious keepsakes, into which is wrought
The giver's loving thought.

Only your love and your remembrance could
Give life to this dead wood,

And make these branches, leafless now so long,
Blossom again in song.

JUGURTHA.

How cold are thy baths, Apollo!
Cried the African monarch, the splendid,
As down to his death in the hollow

Dark dungeons of Rome he descended, Uncrowned, unthroned, unattended; How cold are thy baths, Apollo!

How cold are thy baths, Apollo!

Cried the Poet, unknown, unbefriended, As the vision, that lured him to follow, With the mist and the darkness blended, And the dream of his life was ended; How cold are thy baths, Apollo!

THE IRON PEN,

Made from a fetter of Bonnivard, the Prisoner of Chillon; the handle of wood from the Frigate Constitu tion, and bound with a circlet of gold, inset with three precious stones from Siberia, Ceylon, and Maine.

I THOUGHT this Pen would arise
From the casket where it lies-
Of itself would arise and write
My thanks and my surprise.

When you gave it me under the pines,
I dreamed these gems from the mines
Of Siberia, Ceylon, and Maine
Would glimmer as thoughts in the lines;

That this iron link from the chain
Of Bonnivard night retain

Some verse of the Poet who sang
Of the prisoner and his pain;

That this wood from the frigate's mast
Might write me a rhyme at last,
As it used to write on the sky
The song of the sea and the blast.

But motionless as I wait,
Like a Bishop lying in state

Lies the Pen, with its mitre of gold,
And its jewels inviolate.

Are Manhood, Freedom, Brotherhood, Its discords but an interlude

Between the words.

And then to die so young and leave
Unfinished what he might achieve!
Yet better sure

Is this, than wandering up and down
An old man in a country town,
Infirm and poor.

For now he haunts his native land
As an immortal youth; his hand
Guides every plough;

He sits beside each ingle-nook,
His voice is in each rushing brook,
Each rustling bough.

His presence haunts this room to-night
A form of mingled mist and light
From that far coast.

Welcome beneath this roof of mine!
Welcome! this vacant chair is thine,
Dear guest and ghost!

ROBERT BURNS.

I SEE amid the fields of Ayr
A ploughman, who, in foul and fair,
Sings at his task

So clear, we know not if it is
The laverock's song we hear, or his,
Nor care to ask.

For him the ploughing of those fields
A more ethereal harvest yields

Than sheaves of grain;
Songs flush with purple bloom the rye,
The plover's call, the curlew's cry,
Sing in his brain.

Touched by his hand, the wayside weed Becomes a flower; the lowliest reed Beside the stream

Is clothed with beauty; gorse and grass
And heather, where his footsteps pass,
The brighter seem.

He sings of love, whose flame illumes
The darkness of lone cottage rooms;
He feels the force,

The treacherous undertow and stress
Of wayward passions, and no less
The keen remorse.

At moments, wrestling with his fate,
His voice is harsh, but not with hate;
The brush-wood, hung

Above the tavern door, lets fall
Its bitter leaf, its drop of gall
Upon his tongue.

But still the music of his song
Rises o'er all elate and strong;
Its master-chords

HELEN OF TYRE.

WHAT phantom is this that appears
Through the purple mists of the years,
Itself but a mist like these?
A woman of cloud and of fire;
It is she; it is Helen of Tyre,

The town in the midst of the seas.

O Tyre! in thy crowded streets
The phantom appears and retreats,
And the Israelites that sell
Thy lilies and lions of brass,
Look up as they see her pass,
And murmur "Jezebel!"

Then another phantom is seen
At her side, in a gray gabardine,

With beard that floats to his waist;
It is Simon Magus, the Seer;
He speaks, and she pauses to hear
The words he utters in haste.

He says: "From this evil fame,
From this life of sorrow and shame,

I will lift thee and make thee mine;
Thou hast been Queen Candace,
And Helen of Troy, and shalt be
The Intelligence Divine!"

Oh, sweet as the breath of morn,
To the fallen and forlorn

Are wispered words of praise;
For the famished heart believes
The falsehood that tempts and deceives,
And the promise that betrays.

So she follows from land to land
The wizard's beckoning hand,

As a leaf is blown by the gust,