COWPER'S GRAVE.

I.

It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying,— It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying: Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish ! Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.

II.

O poets! from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing!

O Christians! at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was

clinging!

O men! this man, in brotherhood, your weary paths beguiling, Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

III.

And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,

How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory;

And how, when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights

departed,

He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted;

IV.

He shall be strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation,
And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration :
Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken;
Named softly, as the household name of one whom God hath
taken.

V.

With quiet sadness and no gloom, I learn to think upon him, With meekness, that is gratefulness to God whose heaven hath won him

Who suffered once the madness-cloud, to His own love to blind

him ;

But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him;

VI.

And wrought within his shattered brain such quick poetic senses,
As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences!
The pulse of dew upon the grass, kept his within its number;
And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.

VII.

Wild timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home. caresses,

Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses:

The very world, by God's constraint, from falsehood's ways removing,

Its women and its men became, beside him, true and loving.

VIII.

But while in blindness he remained unconscious of the guiding,
And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,
He testified this solemn truth, though frenzy desolated-
Nor man, nor nature satisfy, whom only God created!

IX.

Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother, while she blesses And drops upon his burning brow the coolness of her kisses; That turns his fevered eyes around—" My mother! where's my mother?"—

As if such tender words and looks could come from any other!

X.

The fever gone, with leaps of heart, he sees her bending o'er him; Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore

him!

Thus woke the poet from the dream, his life's long fever gave him, Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes, which closed in death, to save him!

XI.

Thus? oh, not thus! no type of earth could image that awaking, Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him

breaking,

Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted ;

But felt those eyes alone, and knew "My Saviour! not deserted!"

XII.

Deserted! who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested,
Upon the Victim's hidden face, no love was manifested?
What frantic hands outstretched have e'er the atoning drops
averted,

What tears have washed them from the soul, that one should be deserted?

XIII.

Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather: And Adam's sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father;

Yea, once, Immanuel's orphaned cry, His universe hath shakenIt went up single, echoless, "My God, I am forsaken!"

XIV.

It went up from the Holy's lips amid His lost creation,
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation;
That earth's worst frenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope's
fruition,

And I, on Cowper's grave, should see his rapture, in a vision!

SOUNDS.

Ηκουσας η ουκ ηκούσας ;

ÆSCHYLUS.

I.

HEARKEN, hearken!
The rapid river carrieth
Many noises underneath
The hoary ocean ;
Teaching his solemnity,

Sounds of inland life and glee,

Learnt beside the waving tree,

When the winds in summer prank

Toss the shades from bank to bank,
And the quick rains, in emotion

Which rather glads than grieves,
Count and visibly rehearse
The pulses of the universe
Upon the summer leaves-
Learnt among the lilies straight,
When they bow them to the weight
Of many bees, whose hidden hum
Seemeth from themselves to come-
Learnt among the grasses green,
Where the rustling mice are seen,
By the gleaming, as they run,
Of their quick eyes in the sun;
And lazy sheep are browsing through,
With their noses trailed in dew;
And the squirrel leaps adown,
Holding fast the filbert brown;
And the lark, with more of mirth
In his song than suiteth earth,
Droppeth some in soaring high,
To pour the rest out in the sky :
While the woodland doves, apart
In the copse's leafy heart,
Solitary not ascetic,

Hidden and yet vocal, seem
Joining, in a lovely psalm,

Man's despondence, nature's calm,
Half mystical and half pathetic,

Like a sighing in a dream.

*

All these sounds the river telleth,
Softened to an undertone,

Which ever and anon he swelleth

By a burden of his own,

In the ocean's ear.

Ay! and ocean seems to hear,

* "While floating up bright forms ideal,

Mistress, or friend, around me stream;
Half sense-supplied, and half unreal,
Like music mingling with a dream.”

"

John Kenyon.

I do not doubt that the "music" of the two concluding lines mingled, though very unconsciously, with my own dream," and gave their form and pressure to the above distich. The ideas, however, being sufficiently distinct, I am satisfied with sending this note to the press after my verses, and with acknowledging another obligation to the valued friend to whom I already owe so many.

The child is shouting at his play
Just in the tramping funeral's way;
The widow moans as she turns aside
To shun the face of the blushing bride,
While, shaking the tower of the ancient church,
The marriage bells do swing;

And in the shadow of the porch

An idiot sits, with his lean hands full
Of hedgerow flowers and a poet's skull,
Laughing loud and gibbering,
Because it is so brown a thing,

While he sticketh the gaudy poppies red
In and out the senseless head,

Where all sweet fancies grew instead.
And you may hear, at the self-same time,
Another poet who reads his rhyme,
Low as a brook in the summer air,—
Save when he droppeth his voice adown,
To dream of the amaranthine crown

His mortal brows shall wear.

And a baby cries with a feeble sound

'Neath the weary weight of the life new-found;
And an old man groans—with his testament
Only half signed-for the life that's spent ;
And lovers twain do softly say,

As they sit on a grave, “For aye, for aye!"
And foemen twain, while Earth, their mother,
Looks greenly upward, curse each other;
A schoolboy drones his task, with looks
Cast over the page to the elm-tree rooks:
A lonely student cries aloud,

Eureka! clasping at his shroud;

A beldame's age-cracked voice doth sing
To a little infant slumbering;

A maid forgotten weeps alone,
Muffling her sobs on the trysting stone;