The soul of light vivid shone, a stream within stream;

The soul of sound from a musical shell outflew ;

Where others hear but a hum and see but a beam,

The tongue and eye of the fountain of life he knew.

He knew the Hours: they were round him, laden with seed

Of hours bestrewn upon vapour, and one by one

They winged as ripened in fruit the burden decreed

For each to scatter; they flushed like the buds in sun,

Bequeathing seed to successive similar rings,

Their sisters, bearers to men of what men have earned:

He knew them, talked with the yet unreddened; the stings,

The sweets, they warmed at their bosoms divined, discerned.

Not unsolicited, sought by diligent feet, By riddling fingers expanded, oft watched in growth

With brooding deep as the noon-ray's quickening wheat,

Ere touch'd, the pendulous flower of the plants of sloth,

The plants of rigidness, answered question and squeeze,

Revealing wherefore it bloomed uninviting, bent,

Yet making harmony breathe of life and disease,

The deeper chord of a wonderful instru

ment.

So passed he luminous-eyed for earth and the fates

We arm to bruise or caress us: his ears were charged

With tones of love in a whirl of voluble hates,

With music wrought of distraction his hear enlarged.

Celestial-shining, though mortal, singer, though mute,

He drew the Master of harmonies, voiced or stilled,

To seek him; heard at the silent medicine

root

A song, beheld in fulfilment the unfulfilled.

Him Phoebus, lending to darkness colour and form

Of light's excess, many lessons and counsels gave;

Showed Wisdom lord of the human intricate swarm,

And whence prophetic it looks on the hives that rave,

And how acquired, of the zeal of love to acquire,

And where it stands, in the centre of life a sphere;

And Measure, mood of the lyre, the rapturous lyre,

He said was Wisdom, and struck him the notes to hear.

Sweet, sweet: 't was glory of vision, honey, the breeze

In heat, the run of the river on root and stone,

All senses joined, as the sister Pierides
Are one, uplifting their chorus, the Nine,

his own.

In stately order, evolved of sound into sight,

From sight to sound intershifting, the man descried

The growths of earth, his adored, like day out of night,

Ascend in song, seeing nature and song allied.

And there vitality, there, there solely in song,

Resides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs,

Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it strong,

The Master said: and the studious eye that reads,

(Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the mount),

In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound.

Pursue thy craft: it is music drawn of a fount

To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground.

Melampus dwelt among men: physician and sage,

He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed

Or them that frenzied in some delirious

rage

Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.

He played on men, as his master, Phoebus, on strings

Melodious as the God did he drive and check,

Through love exceeding a simple love of the things

That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.

500

Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less:

Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with hailstones

Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless.

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping

Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,

Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:

So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.

Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,

Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

Ay, but shows the South-West a ripplefeathered bosom

Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend

Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset

Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.

When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window

Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams,

Beautiful she looks, like a white waterlily

Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams.

When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle

In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May,

Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily Pure from the night, and splendid for the day.

Mother of the dews, dark eye-lashed twilight,

Low-lidded twilight, o'er the valley's brim,

Rounding on thy breast sings the dewdelighted skylark,

Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him.

Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet,

Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain-showers.

Let me hear her laughter, I would have her

ever

Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers.

All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose;

Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands.

My sweet leads: she knows not why, but now she loiters,

Eyes the bent anemones, and hangs her hands.

Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping,

Coming the rose: and unaware a cry Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour,

Covert and the nightingale; she knows not why.

Kerchiefed head and chin she darts between her tulips,

Streaming like a willow grey in arrowy rain:

Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes,

Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine

Bears me to her pillow under white rosewreaths.

Yellow with bird foot-trefoil are the grassglades;

Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf;

Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow;

Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf.

Green-yellow bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle;

Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine:

Earth in her heart laughs looking at the heavens,

Thinking of the harvest: I look and think of mine.

Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy

Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,

Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sunshine;

O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool!

Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher

Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak.

Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,

Said, 'I will kiss you'; she laughed and leaned her cheek.

Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof

Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo.

Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway

Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue.

Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river, Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly.

Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,

Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasurearmful!

O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!

O the treasure-tresses one another over Nodding! O the girdle slack about the waist!

Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet

Quick amid the wheatears: wound about the waist,

Gathered, see these brides of Earth one blush of ripeness!

O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!

Large and smoky red the sun's cold disk drops,

Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded

snow:

Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moonrise,

Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow.

Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree

Gazes in this whiteness; nightlong could I. Here may life on death or death on life be painted.

Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die!

Gossips count her faults: they scour a narrow chamber

Where there is no window, read not heaven or her.

'When she was a tiny,' one aged woman

quavers,

Plucks at my heart and leads me by the

ear.

Faults she had once as she learnt to run

and tumbled:

Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.

Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet.

Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,

Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise

High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger;

Yet am I the light and living of her eyes. Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming,

Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames.

Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting, Arms up, she dropped: our souls were in

our names.

Soon will she lie like a white frost sunrise. Yellow oats and brown wheat, barley pale

as rye,

Long since your sheaves have yielded to the thresher,

Felt the girdle loosened, seen the tresses fly.

Soon will she lie like a blood-red sunset. Swift with the to-morrow, green-winged Spring!

Sing from the South-West, bring her back the truants,

Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing.

Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you

Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields,

Youngest green transfused in silver shining through:

Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry:

Fair as in image my seraph love appears Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eyelids:

Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears.

PITCH here the tent, while the old horse grazes:

By the old hedge-side we 'll halt a stage. It 's nigh my last above the daisies:

My next leaf 'll be man's blank page. Yes, my old girl! and it 's no use crying: Juggler, constable, king, must bow. One that outjuggles all 's been spying

Long to have me, and he has me now. We 've travelled times to this old common: Often we 've hung our pots in the gorse. We 've had a stirring life, old woman! You, and I, and the old grey horse.

Races, and fairs, and royal occasions,
Found us coming to their call:
Now they'll miss us at our stations:
There's a Juggler outjuggles all!

Up goes the lark, as if all were jolly! Over the duck-pond the willow shakes. Easy to think that grieving 's folly,

When the hand 's firm as driven stakes! Ay, when we 're strong, and braced, and manful,

Life's a sweet fiddle: but we 're a batch Born to become the Great Juggler's han'ful:

Balls he shies up, and is safe to catch.

Here's where the lads of the village cricket:

I was a lad not wide from here: Could n't I whip off the bale from the wicket?

Like an old world those days appear! Donkey, sheep, geese, and thatched alehouse I know them!

They are old friends of my halts, and

seem,

Somehow, as if kind thanks I owe them: Juggling don't hinder the heart's es

teem.

Juggling 's no sin, for we must have victual:

Nature allows us to bait for the fool. Holding one's own makes us juggle no little;

But, to increase it, hard juggling 's the rule.

You that are sneering at my profession, Have n't you juggled a vast amount? There's the Prime Minister, in one Session,

Juggles more games than my sins '11

count.

I've murdered insects with mock thunder: Conscience, for that, in men don't quail. I 've made bread from the bump of wonder:

That's my business, and there's my tale.

Fashion and rank all praised the professor: Ay! and I've had my smile from the Queen:

Bravo, Jerry! she meant: God bless her! Ain't this a sermon on that scene?

I've studied men from my topsy-turvy
Close, and, I reckon, rather true.
Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy:
Most, a dash between the two.

But it's a woman, old girl, that makes me
Think more kindly of the race:
And it's a woman, old girl, that shakes me
When the Great Juggler I must face.