Part 4

All doubt is hushed for ever, Confuted without sound, All ruin featly ended, When bulbs begin their splendid Gay muster overground;

And mid the golden heralds That ride the icy breeze, Man, too, divinely vernal, Storms into life eternal Victoriously with these.

O Beauty, O Persistence Ineffable and strong! Would we had borne with Sorrow In her unlasting morrow: And Death was not for long.

_A Valediction_

_R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV_

WHEN from the vista of the Book I shrink, From lauded pens that earn ignoble wage Begetting nothing joyous, nothing sage, Nor keep with Shakespeare's use one golden link; When heavily my sanguine spirits sink To read too plain on each impostor page Only of kings the broken lineage,-- Well for my peace if then on thee I think,

Louis, our priest of letters, and our knight With whose familiar baldric Hope is girt, From whose young hands she bears the Grail away. All glad, all great! Truer because thou wert, I am and must be; and in thy known light Go down to dust, content with this my day.

_A Footpath Morality_

ALONG the Hills, height unto height Tosses the dappled light, Rills in a torrent flow, And cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow. Young winds nothing can quell Scale the wild-chestnut citadel, Again to make Its thousand faëry white pagodas shake. Up many a lane The blue vervain A coverlid hath featly spread For the bees' bed, That those tired sylvan thieves May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves. And by to-morrow morn Bright agrimony, in the thickets born, Will high uphold Each cinquefoil of plain gold; Dogwood in white will hood herself apace, And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace, And copper pimpernel, true as a clock, On some waste common, by a rock Her small dark-centred wheel draw in Long, long ere dusk begin.

This day Of infinite May Is far more fitly yours than ours, O spirit-bodied flowers! What heart disordered sore Comes through the greenwood door, Shall for your sake Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break; And hearts beneath no ban Will in your sight some penance do for man, Poor lagging man, content to be Sick with the impact of eternity, Who might keep step with you in the low grass, Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass! Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown To flourish fair and fall fair, and be strewn Deep in that Will of God, where blend The origin of beauty and the end.

_The Light of the House_

BEYOND the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live; You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive; You linger on the stair: Love's lonely pulses leap! The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep.

Here, after all the years, you keep the heirdom still; The youth and joy in you achieve their olden will, Unbidden, undeterred, with waking sense adored; And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord.

To every inmate heart, confirmed in cheer you brought, Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought, And to a wonted guest (not awestruck heretofore), The sunshine that was you floods all the open door.

_An Outdoor Litany_

_Donec misereatur nostri._

THE spur is red upon the briar, The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore; The wind shakes out the coloured fire From lamps a-row on the sycamore; The bluebird with his flitting note Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat; The mink is busy; herds again Go hillward in the honeyed rain; The midges meet. I cry to Thee Whose heart Remembers each of these: Thou art My God who hast forgotten me!

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, The lined gulls in the offing ride; Along an edge of marshy ground The shad-bush enters like a bride. Yon little clouds are washed of care That climb the blue New England air, And almost merrily withal The hyla tunes at evenfall His oboe in a mossy tree. So too, Am I not Thine? Arise, undo This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

Happy the vernal rout that come To their due offices to-day, And strange, if in Thy mercy's sum, Excluded man alone decay. I ask no triumph, ask no joy, Save leave to live, in law's employ. As to a weed, to me but give Thy sap! lest aye inoperative Here in the Pit my strength shall be: And still Help me endure the Pit, until Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

_Of Joan's Youth_

I WOULD unto my fair restore A simple thing: The flushing cheek she had before! Out-velveting No more, no more, On our sad shore, The carmine grape, the moth's auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooding grass Unmoor the rose; Or guileful ways the salmon pass To sea, disclose: For so, alas, With Love, alas, With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

_In a Brecon Valley_

_Patulis ubi vallibus errans Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater._ H.V. _Ad Posteros._

I

I FOLLOWED thee, wild stream of Paradise, White Usk, for ever showering the sunned bee In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree; And all along had magical surmise Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies, As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea, Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly The giant breakers form, and fall, and rise.

Above thy poet's dust, by yonder yew, Ere distance perished, ere a star began, His clear monastic measure, heard of few, Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran; And thou to me wert dear, because I knew The God who made thee gracious, and the man.

II

IF, by that second lover's power controlled, In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o'erfills Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils, From distance unto distance trailing gold; If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold, Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills Diviner run thy shallows than of old;--

If intellectual these, Oh! name my Vaughan Creator too: and close his memory keep Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep; A play of thought more mystic than the dawn, And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.

_A Song of Far Travel_

MANY a time some drowsy oar from the nearer bank invited, Crossed a narrow stream, and bore in among the reeds moon-lighted, There to leave me on a shore no ferryman hath sighted.

Many a time a mountain stile, dark and bright with sudden wetting, Lured my vagrant foot the while 'twixt uplifting and down-setting,-- Whither? Thousand mile on mile, beyond the last forgetting.

Long by hidden ways I wend (past occasion grown a ranger); Yet enchantment, like a friend, takes from death the tang of danger: Hardly river or road can end where I need step a stranger.

_Spring_

_With a difference._--HAMLET.

AGAIN the bloom, the northward flight, The fount freed at its silver height, And down the deep woods to the lowest The fragrant shadows scarred with light.

O inescapeable joy of Spring! For thee the world shall leap and sing; But by her darkened door thou goest Henceforward as a spectral thing.

_The Colour-Bearer_

THY charge was: "Hold My banner Against our hidden foe; To war where sounds no manner Of glorious music, go!" And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."

Ah, not to brave Thy censure But win Thy smile of light, My heart of misadventure Will end in the losing fight, And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.

The day will pass of torment, The evenfall be sweet When I shall wear for garment The nakedness of defeat. But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet

That eagle of the wartime, That oriflamme, outrolled With strength of staff aforetime, With cleanly and costly fold,-- Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,

And take from me (turned donor That night on blood-soaked sand), The stick and rag of Honour There safe in a stiffened hand, Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.

_Sanctuary_

HIGH above hate I dwell: O storms! farewell. Though at my sill your daggered thunders play Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day, To me they sound more small Than a young fay's footfall: Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low In Long Ago, And winnowed into silence on that wind Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.

Hither Felicity Doth climb to me, And bank me in with turf and marjoram Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb; With golden barberry-wreath, And bluets thick beneath; One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest With bud-red breast, Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage Float less than April fog below our hermitage.

_Emily Brontë_

WHAT sacramental hurt that brings The terror of the truth of things Had changed thee? Secret be it yet. 'Twas thine, upon a headland set, To view no isles of man's delight, With lyric foam in rainbow flight, But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar, Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.

_Pascal_

THOU lovedst life, but not to brand it thine (O rich in all forborne felicities!), Nor use it with marauding power, to seize And stain the sweet earth's blue horizon-line. Virgin the grape might in the trellis twine Where thou hadst long ago an hour of ease, And foot of thine across the unpressed leas Went light as some Idæan foot divine.

Spirit so abstinent, in thy deeps lay What passion of possession? Day by day Was there no thirst upon thee, sharp and pure, In forward sea-like surges unforgot? Yes: and in life and death those joys endure More blessedly, that men can name them not.

_Borderlands_

THROUGH all the evening, All the virginal long evening, Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone; For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during; And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring, Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

Yet in the valley, At a turn of the orchard alley, When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air, Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee, Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee, O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!

_Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore_

THERE in his room, whene'er the moon looks in, To silver now a shell, and now a fin, And o'er his chart glide like an argosy, Quiet and old sits he. Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile. Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast, Strange face of beauty sought and lost, Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?

Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old, The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss Their veering weight across. On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled, To lands where stunted cedars throw A lace-like shadow over snow, Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

Again play up and down the briny spar Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar, Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new, The Labradorian blue; All homeless hurricanes about him break; The purples of spent day he sees From Samos to the Hebrides, And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried, Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide, Away, and far away, his barque is borne Riding the noisy morn, Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know The helm and tightening halyards still Follow the urging of his will, And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high, And shackles him with many an inland tie, And of his only wisdom makes a jibe Amid an alien tribe: No wave abroad but moans his fallen state. The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars! Why is it on a yellowing page he pores? Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim, Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him! Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole Unto his subject soul, Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth, Nor hath so tamely worn her chain, But she may know that voice again, And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

And give him back, before his passion fail, The singing cordage and the hollow sail, And level with those ageing eyes let be The bright unsteady sea; And like a film remove from sense and brain This pasture wall, these boughs that run Their evening arches to the sun, Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

And on the shut space and the shallow hour, Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower, With rapt arrest and solemn loitering, Him whom thou lovedst, bring: That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip, Not having, at the last, less grace Of thee than had his roving race, Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.

OXFORD AND LONDON

XXVI SONNETS

OXFORD

I. _The Tow-Path_

FURROW to furrow, oar to oar succeeds, Each length away, more bright, more exquisite; The sister shells that hither, thither, flit Strew the long stream like scattered maple-seeds. A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads, Who with short calls his pace doth intermit: An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sits, Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.

West of the glowing hayricks, tawny black Where waters by their warm escarpments run, Two lovers, newly crossed from Kennington, Print in the early dew a married track, And drain the aroma'd eve, and spend the sun, Ere in laborious health the crews come back.

II. _Ad Antiquarium_

MY gentle Aubrey, who in everything Hadst of thy city's youth so lovely lust, Yet never lineal to her towers august Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring, Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering, Thy comely manuscript, and interthrust Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust, Two centuries unkissed of any Spring.

Filling a homesick page beneath a lime, Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor's now, The endless terraces of ended Time Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou, Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.

III. _Martyrs' Memorial_

SUCH natural debts of love our Oxford knows, So many ancient dues undesecrate, I marvel how the landmark of a hate For witness unto future time she chose; How 'gainst her own corroborate ranks arose The Three, in great denial only great, For Art's enshrining! Thus, averted straight, My soul to seek a holier captain goes:

That sweet adventurer whom Truth befell Whenas the synagogues were watching not; Whose crystal name on royal Oriel Hangs like a shield; who to an outland spot Led hence, beholds his Star, and counts it well To live of all his dear domain forgot.

IV. _Parks Road_

VIEWED yesterday, in sad elusive light, These everlasting heptarchs, tree by tree, Seemed filing off to exile, lingeringly, Each with his giant falchion, kinless quite. All the wild winter day and flooded night They feigned to march far as the eye could see, Through transient oceans plunging to the knee Their centuried greaves, ebon and malachite.

To-day, accustomed bole and branch all bare Stand with old gems inlaid. Like coloured snow Or vista'd flame along the drowsy air, Their gold-green lichens stir and cling and glow. What secret craftsmen painted them so fair? Angels of Moisture and the Long Ago.

V. _Tom_

HARK! the king bell, loud in his vesper choir. As in between each golden roar doth come That solemn, plangent, unregarded hum Chiding the truant with archaic ire, On Worcester mere far off, in elfin gyre The wavelets laugh, and laughter showereth from May's chestnut like a lampadarium By Brasenose, with every point afire.

Yet over all roofs to the uttermost, Call, Shepherd dear, from thy dream-haunted ground: For some there be, on whatsoever coast, In midst of any morrow's ordered round, Hear as of old (in earth and heaven an host!) And like young lambs, leap homeward at the sound.

VI. _On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford_

I

IMPERIAL Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green, And Templar Sandford in the boatman's call, And sweet-belled Appleton, and Elsfield wall That dost upon adoring ivies lean; Meek Binsey; Dorchester, where streams convene Bidding on graves thy solemn shadow fall; Clear Cassington, soaring perpetual, Holton, and Hampton Poyle, and fanes between:

If one of all in your sad courts that come Belovèd and disparted! be your own, Kin to the souls ye had, while yet endures Some memory of a great communion known At home in quarries of old Christendom,-- Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours.

II

IS this the end? Is this the pilgrim's day For dread, for dereliction, and for tears? Rather, from grass and air and many spheres In prophecy his heart is called away; And under English eaves, more still than they, Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears The long-arrested, the believing years Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say:

"Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best Who had such beauty"? or, with spirit fain To watch beside her darkened doors, go by With a new psalm: "O banished Light so nigh! Of them was I, who bore thee and who blest: Even here remember me when thou shalt reign."

VII. _A December Walk_

WHITHERSOEVER cold and fair ye flow, Take me, O gentle moon and gentler wind, Past Wyatt's cumbering portal, frost-entwined, And Merton 'neath that huge tiara's glow, And groves in bridal gossamer below Saint Mary's armoured spire; and whence aligned In altered eminence for dawn to find Sleep the droll Cæsars, hooded with the snow.

White sacraments of weather, shine on me! Upbear my footfall and my fancy sift, Lest either blemish an ensainted ground Spread so with childhood. Bid with me, outbound, On recollected wing mine angel drift Across new spheres of immortality.

VIII. _The Old Dial of Corpus_

WARDEN of hours and ages, here I dwell, Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook For good unborn; and towards a willow nook, Pole, princely in the senate and the cell; And doubting the near boom of Osney bell, Turning on me that sweetly subtile look, Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book: Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.

Naught steadfast may I image nor attain Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope After my god, like him, inconstant bright: But sun and shade will unto you remain Alternately a symbol and a hope, Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.

IX. _Rooks: New College Gardens_

THROUGH rosy cloud and over thorny towers, Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled, From Isis' valley border, many-hilled, The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers: Not for men only, and their musing hours By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build These dewy spaces early sown and stilled, These dearest inland melancholy bowers.

Blest birds! A book held open on the knee Below, is all they guess of Adam's blight: With surer art the while, and simpler rite, They gather power in some monastic tree Where breathe against their docile breasts by night The scholar's star, the star of sanctity.

X. _Above Port Meadow_

THE plain gives freedom. Hither from the town How oft a dreamer and a book of yore Escaped the lamplit Square, and heard no more Inroll from Cowley turf the game's renown, But bade the vernal sky with spices drown His head by Plato's in the grass, before Yon oar that's never old, the sunset oar, At Medley Lock was laid reluctant down!

So seeming far the confines and the crowd, The gross routine, the cares that vex and tire, From this large light, sad thoughts in it, high-driven, Go happier than the inly-moving cloud Who lets her vesture fall, a floss of fire, Abstracted, on the ivory hills of heaven.

XI. _Undertones at Magdalen_

FAIR are the finer creature-sounds; of these Is Magdalen full: her bees, the while they drop Susurrant to the garth from weeds atop; And round the priestless Pulpit, auguries Of wrens in council from an hundred leas; And merry fish of Cherwell, fain to stop The water-plantain's way; and deer that crop Delicious herbage under choral trees.

The cry for silver and gold in Christendom Without, threads not her silence and her dark. Only against the isolate Tower there break Low rhythmic murmurs of good men to come: Invasive seas of hushed approach that make Memorial music, would the ear but hark.

XII. _A Last View_

I

WHERE down the hill, across the hidden ford Stretches the open aisle from scene to scene, By halted horses silently we lean, Gazing enchanted from our steeper sward. How yon low loving skies of April hoard A plot of pinnacles! and how with sheen Of spike and ball her languid clouds between Grey Oxford grandly rises riverward!

Sweet on those dim long-dedicated walls Silver as rain the frugal sunshine falls; Slowly sad eyes resign them, bound afar. Dear Beauty, dear Tradition, fare you well, And powers that aye aglow in you, impel Our quickening spirits from the slime we are.

II

STARS in the bosom of thy braided tide, Soft air and ivy on thy gracile stone, O Glory of the West, as thou wert sown, Stand perfect: O miraculous, abide! And still, for greatness flickering from thy side, Eternal alchemist, evoke, enthrone True heirs in true succession, later blown From that same seed of fire which never died.

Nor Love shall lack her solace, to behold Ranged to the morrow's melancholy verge, Thy lights uprisen in Thought's disclosing spaces; And round some beacon-spirit, stable, old, In radiant broad tumultuary surge For ever, the young voices, the young faces.

LONDON

I. _On First Entering Westminster Abbey_

HOLY of England! since my light is short And faint, Oh, rather by the sun anew Of timeless passion set my dial true, That with thy saints and thee I may consort; And wafted in the cool enshadowed port Of poets, seem a little sail long due, And be as one the call of memory drew Unto the saddle void since Agincourt.

Not now for secular love's unquiet lease Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile Hath broken tryst with transitory things; But seal with her a marriage and a peace Eternal, on thine Edward's altar isle, Above the storm-spent sea of ended Kings.

II. _Fog_

LIKE bodiless water passing in a sigh, Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow, And in their sharp disastrous undertow Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky. The towery vista sinks upon the eye, As if it heard the horns of Jericho, Black and dissolved; nor could the founder, know How what was built so bright should daily die.

Thy mood with man's is broken and blent in, City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown The natural light in which thy life began; Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin, Greater and elder yet the love of man Full in thy look, though the dark visor's down.

III. _St. Peter-ad-Vincula_

TOO well I know, pacing the place of awe, Three Queens, young save in trouble, moulder by; More in his halo, Monmouth's mocking eye, The eagle Essex in a harpy's claw; Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw Sundown of Scotland; how with treasons lie White martyrdoms: rank in a company Breaker and builder of the eternal Law.

Oft as I come, the piteous garden-row Of ruined roses hanging from the stem, Where winds of old defeat yet batter them, Infects me: suddenly must I depart, Ere thought of man's injustice then and now Add to these aisles one other broken heart.

IV. _Strikers in Hyde Park_