The old man weeps.

His aimless hands the joyless books put by;
As one that dreams and fears to wake, the sage
With vacant eye stifles the trembling taper,
Lets in the moonlight-and for once is wise.

SONNETS.

AMERICA.

Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns.
But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry?
Not that our sires did love in years gone by,
When all the Pilgrim Fathers were little sons
In merrie homes of Englaunde? Back, and see
Thy satchelled ancestor! Behold, he runs

To mine, and, clasped, they tread the equal lea
To the same village-school, where side by side
They spell 'Our Father.' Hard by, the twin pride
Of that grey hall whose ancient oriel gleams
Thro' yon baronial pines, with looks of light
Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree.

Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams
His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?

Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us? Oh ye
Who north or south, on east or western land,
Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth,
Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God
For God; oh ye who in eternal youth
Speak with a living and creative flood
This universal English, and do stand

Its breathing book; live worthy of that grand
Heroic utterance-parted, yet a whole,
Far, yet unsevered,-children brave and free
Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be
Lords of an Empire wide as Shakespeare's soul,
Sublime as Milton's immemorial theme,

And rich as Chaucer's speech, and fair as Spenser's dream.

THE COMMON GRAVE.

Last night beneath the foreign stars I stood,
And saw the thoughts of those at home go by
To the great grave upon the hill of blood.
Upon the darkness they went visibly,
Each in the vesture of its own distress.

Among them there came One, frail as a sigh,
And like a creature of the wilderness

Dug with her bleeding hands. She neither cried
Nor wept; nor did she see the many stark
And dead that lay unburied at her side.

All night she toiled; and at that time of dawn,
When Day and Night do change their More and Less,
And Day is More, I saw the melting Dark
Stir to the last, and knew she laboured on.

ENGLAND.

[From Balder.]

This dear English land!

This happy England, loud with brooks and birds,

Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees

And bloomed from hill to dell; but whose best flowers

Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair

Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods

The pulsing torrent of a nation's heart;

Whose forests stronger than her native oaks

Are living men; and whose unfathomed lakes

For ever calm the unforgotten dead

In quiet graveyards willowed seemly round,
O'er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face.
Whose rocks are rights, consolidate of old

Through unremembered years, around whose base
The ever-surging peoples roll and roar

Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas

That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains,

Souls that from this mere footing of the earth
Lift their great virtues thro' all clouds of Fate
Up to the very heavens, and make them rise
To keep the gods above us!

CHAMOUNI.

If

Thou hast known anywhere amid a storm

Of thunder, when the Heavens and Earth were moved, A gleam of quiet sunshine that hath saved

Thine heart; or where the earthquake hath made wreck, Knowest a stream, that wandereth fair and sweet

As brooks go singing thro' the fields of home;

Or on a sudden when the sea, distent

With windy pride, upriseth thro' the clouds
To set his great head equal with the stars,
Hast sunk Hell-deep, thy noble ship a straw
Betwixt two billows; or in any wild

Barbaric, hast, with half-drawn breath, passed by
The sleeping savage, dreadful still in sleep,
Scarred by a thousand combats, by his side
His rugged spouse-in aught but sex a chief-
Their babe between; or where the stark roof-tree
Of a burnt home blackened and sear lies dark,
Betwixt the gaunt-ribbed ruin, hast thou seen
The rose of peace; or in some donjon deep,
Rent by a giant in the blasted rock
And proof against his peers,-hast thou beheld
Prone in the gloom, naked and shining sad
In her own light of loveliness, a fair
Daughter of Eve: Then as thou seest God
In some material likeness, less and more,
Thou hast seen Chamouni, 'mid sternest Alps
The gentlest valley; bright meandering track
Of summer when she winds among the snows
From Land to Land.

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