A TRANCED beauty dwells upon her face,
A lustrous summer-calm of peace and prayer;
In those still eyes the keenest gaze can trace
No sad disturbance, and no touch of care.
Peace rests upon her lips, and forehead fair,
And temples unadorned. A cloistral grace
Says to the gazer over-bold, 'Beware,'
Yet love hath made her breast his dwelling-place.
An awful night abideth with the pure,
And theirs the only wisdom from above.
She seems to listen to some strain obscure
Of music in sidereal regions wove
Or to await some more transcendent dower
From heaven descending on her like a dove.
COUNT each affliction, whether light or grave,
God's messenger sent down to thee; do thou
With courtesy receive him; rise and bow;
And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave
Permission first his heavenly feet to lave;
Then lay before him all thou hast; allow
No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow,
Or mar thy hospitality; no wave
Of mortal tumult to obliterate
The soul's marmoreal calmness: Grief should be
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate;
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free;
Strong to consume small troubles; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to
the end.
TRAMPLING a dark hill, a red sun athwart,
I saw a host that rent their clothes and hair,
And dashed their spread hands 'gainst that sunset glare,
And cried, Go from us, God, since God thou art!
Utterly from our coasts and towns depart,
Court, camp, and senate-hall, and mountain bare;
Our pomp Thou troublest, and our feast dost scare,
And with Thy temples dost confuse our mart!
Depart Thou from our hearing and our seeing:
Depart Thou from the works and ways of men;
Their laws, their thoughts, the inmost of their being :
Black nightmare, hence! that earth may breathe again!
"Can God depart?" I said. A Voice replied,
Close by-"Not so each Sin at heart is Deicide."
THERE is a soul above the soul of each,
A mightier soul, which yet to each belongs:
There is a sound made of all human speech,
And numerous as the concourse of all songs:
And in that soul lives each, in each that soul,
Through all its ages are its lifetime vast;
Each soul that dies in its most sacred whole,
Receiveth life that shall for ever last.
And thus for ever with a wider span
Humanity o'erarches time and death;
Man can elect the universal man,
And live in life that ends not with his breath:
And gather glory that increases still
Till Time his glass with Death's last dust shall fill.
OVER that breathing waste of friends and foes,
The wounded and the dying, hour by hour,
In will a thousand, yet but one in power,
He labours through the red and groaning day.
The fearful moorland where the myriads lay
Moved as a moving field of mangled worms:
And as a raw brood, orphaned in the storms,
Thrust up their heads if the wind bend a spray
Above them, but when the bare branch performs
No sweet paternal office, sink away
With helpless chirp of woe,—so, as he goes,
Around his feet in clamorous agony
They rise and fall; and all the seething plain
Bubbles a cauldron vast of many-coloured pain.
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