For were you queen of all that is,
I could not stoop to such a mind.
You sought to prove how I could love,
And my disdain is my reply.

The lion on your old stone gates
Is not more cold to you than I.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

You put strange memories in my head.
Not thrice your branching limes have blown
Since I beheld young Laurence dead.
O, your sweet eyes, your low replies!
A great enchantress you may be;

But there was that across his throat
Which you had hardly cared to see.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

When thus he met his mother's view, She had the passions of her kind,

She spake some certain truths of you. Indeed, I heard one bitter word

That scarce is fit for you to hear;

Her manners had not that repose

Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

There stands a specter in your hall: The guilt of blood is at your door: You changed a wholesome heart to gall You held your course without remorse, To make him trust his modest worth, And, last, you fixed a vacant stare,

And slew him with your noble birth.

Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,

From yon blue heavens above us bent

The grand old gardener and his wife
Smile at the claims of long descent.
Howe'er it be, it seems to me,

'Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

I know you, Clara Vere de Vere:

You pine among your halls and towers:
The languid light of your proud eyes
Is wearied of the rolling hours.
In glowing health, with boundless wealth,
But sickening of a vague disease,

You know so ill to deal with time,

You needs must play such pranks as these.

Clara, Clara Vere de Vere,

If time be heavy on your hands, Are there no beggars at your gate, Nor any poor about your lands? O, teach the orphan boy to read, Or teach the orphan girl to sew; Pray Heaven for a human heart, And let the foolish yeoman go.

ARDEN SHIPWRECKED1

THE mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,

The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The luster of the long convolvuluses

That coiled around the stately stems, and ran

1 from "Enoch Arden"

Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branched
And blossomed in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwrecked sailor, waiting for a sail :

No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east ;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again

The scarlet shafts of sunrise,

but no sail.

WIDOW AND CHILD1

HOME they brought her warrior dead;
She nor swooned, nor uttered cry.

All her maidens, watching, said

"She must weep, or she will die."

Then they praised him, soft and low;
Called him worthy to be loved:
Truest friend and noblest foe.

Yet she neither spake nor moved.

1 from "The Princess "

Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,

Set his child upon her knee.
Like summer tempest came her tears:
"Sweet my child, I live for thee!"

THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE

TEARS, idle tears! I know not what they mean: Tears, from the depth of some divine despair, Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail That brings our friends up from the under-world; Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge :

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah! sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square: So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret :
O death in life! the days that are no more.

POE

1809-1849

EDGAR ALLAN POE, the most brilliant of the early American poets, was born in Boston in 1809. On the death of his parents, who were members of the theatrical profession, he was adopted by a merchant of Richmond and sent to school. In 1822 he entered the University of Virginia; but his habits

were such as to compel his expulsion. His foster-father refusing young Poe's demands for money, the latter resolved to go, like Byron, to the aid of the struggling Greeks. He went to Europe, only to be sent home by the United States Consul at St. Petersburg. His benefactor next procured him an appointment to West Point; but young Poe could not endure the strict discipline of cadet-life, and in less than a year he was dismissed. Again he was received at the house of his foster-father; but his stay, this time, was short for some offense whose nature has never been clearly explained, he was shut out forever from the house that had been his only home.