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Not the dawn, ere yet the imprisoning night has half released her, More desires the sun's full face of cheer, than we,

Well as yet we love the strength of the iron-tongued north-easter,

Yearn for wind to meet us as we front the sea.

All thy ways are good, O wind, and all the world should fester,

Were thy fourfold godhead quenched, or stilled thy strife:

Yet the waves and we desire too long the deep south-wester,

Whence the waters quicken shoreward, clothed with life.

Yet the field not made for ploughing save of keels nor harrowing Save of storm-winds lies unbrightened by thy breath:

Banded broad with ruddy samphire glow the sea-banks narrowing Westward, while the sea gleams chill and still as death.

Sharp and strange from inland sounds thy bitter note of battle,

Blown between grim skies and waters

sullen-souled,

Till the baffled seas bear back, rocks roar and shingles rattle, Vexed and angered and anhungered and acold.

Change thy note, and give the waves their will, and all the measure, Full and perfect, of the music of their might,

Let it fill the bays with thunderous notes of pleasure,

Shake the shores with passion, sound at once and smite.

Sweet are even the mild low notes of wind and sea, but sweeter Sounds the song whose choral wrath of raging rhyme

Bids the shelving shoals keep tune with storm's imperious metre, Bids the rocks and reefs respond in rapturous chime.

Sweet the lisp and lulling whisper and luxurious laughter, [the sun Soft as love or sleep, of waves whereon Dreams, and dreams not of the darkling hours before nor after,

Winged with cloud whose wrath shall bid love's day be done.

Yet shall darkness bring the awakening sea a lordlier lover,

Clothed with strength more amorous and more strenuous will,

Whence her heart of hearts shall kindle and her soul recover

Sense of love too keen to lie for love's sake still.

Let thy strong south-western music sound, and bid the billows Brighten, proud and glad to feel thy Scourge and kiss

Sting and soothe and sway them, bowed as aspens bend or willows,

Yet resurgent still in breathless rage of bliss.

All to-day the slow sleek ripples hardly bear up shore-ward,

Charged with sighs more light than laughter, faint and fair,

Like a woodland lake's weak wavelets lightly lingering forward, [air. Soft and listless as the slumber-stricken Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded,

Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled,

Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded,

Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled.

Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary, Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird:

Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary

Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred.

Let thy clarion sound from westward, let the south bear token

How the glories of thy godhead sound and shine:

Bid the land rejoice to see the landwind's broad wings broken,

Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be thine.

Half the world abhors thee beating back the sea, and blackening Heaven with fierce and woful change of fluctuant form:

All the world acclaims thee shifting sail

again, and slackening

Cloud by cloud the close-reefed cordage of the storm.

Sweeter fields and brighter woods and lordlier hills than waken

Here at sunrise never hailed the sun and thee:

Turn thee then, and give them comfort, shed like rain and shaken

Far as foam that laughs and leaps along the sea.

1889.

IN TIME OF MOURNING

"RETURN," we dare not as we fain Would cry from hearts that yearn: Love dares not bid our dead again Return.

O hearts that strain and burn As fires fast fettered burn and strain ! Bow down, lie still, and learn.

The heart that healed all hearts of pain
No funeral rites inurn:

Its echoes, while the stars remain,
Return.
May, 1885. 1889.

A SEQUENCE OF SONNETS ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT BROWNING

THE clearest eyes in all the world they read

With sense more keen and spirit of sight more true

Than burns and thrills in sunrise, when the dew

Flames, and absorbs the glory round it shed,

As they the light of ages quick and dead, Closed now, forsake us: yet the shaft that slew

Can slay not one of all the works we knew,

Nor death discrown that many-laurelled head.

The works of words whose life seems lightning wrought,

And moulded of unconquerable thought, And quickened with imperishable flame, Stand fast and shine and smile, assured that nought

May fade of all their myriad-moulded fame,

Nor England's memory clasp not Browning's name.

Death, what hast thou to do with one for whom

Time is not lord, but servant? What least part

Of all the fire that fed his living heart, Of all the light more keen than sundawn's bloom

That lit and led his spirit, strong as doom And bright as hope, can aught thy breath may dart

Quench? Nay, thou knowest he knew thee what thou art,

A shadow born of terror's barren womb,

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But he to him, who knows what gift is thine,

Death? Hardly may we think or hope when we

Pass likewise thither where to-night is he,

Beyond the irremeable outer seas that shine

And darken round such dreams as half divine

Some sunlit harbor in that starless sea Where gleams no ship to windward or to lee,

To read with him the secret of thy shrine. There too, as here, may song, delight, and love,

The nightingale, the sea-bird, and the dove,

Fulfil with joy the splendor of the sky Till all beneath wax bright as all above: But none of all that search the heavens,

and try

The sun, may match the sovereign eagle's eye.

Among the wondrous ways of men and time

He went as one that ever found and sought

And bore in hand the lamplike spirit of thought

To illume with instance of its fire sublime

The dusk of many a cloudlike age and clime.

No spirit in shape of light and darkness

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No serpent sleeping in some dead soul's tomb,

No song-bird singing from some live soul's height,

But he might hear, interpret, or illume With sense invasive as the dawn of doom.

What secret thing of splendor or of shade

Surmised in all those wandering ways wherein

Man, led of love and life and death and sin,

Strays, climbs, or cowers, allured, absorbed, afraid,

Might not the strong and sunlike sense invade

Of that full soul that had for aim to win Light, silent over time's dark toil and

din,

Life, at whose touch death fades as dead things fade?

O spirit of man, what mystery moves in

thee

That he might know not of in spirit, and

see

The heart within the heart that seems to strive,

The life within the life that seems to be, And hear through all thy storms that whirl and drive,

The living sound of all men's souls alive?

He held no dream worth waking: so he said,

He who stands now on death's triumphal steep, Awakened out of life wherein we sleep And dream of what he knows and sees, being dead.

But never death for him was dark or dread:

"Look forth" he bade the soul, and fear not. Weep,

All ye that trust not in his truth, and keep

Vain memory's vision of a vanished head As all that lives of all that once was he Save that which lightens from his word: but we,

Who, seeing the sunset-colored waters roll,

Yet know the sun subdued not of the

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