III.

And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!

Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreads
And embeds

Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,

Stock or stone

Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe

Long ago;

Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;

And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.

IV.

Now, the single little turret that remains

On the plains,

By the caper overrooted, by the gourd

Overscored,

While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks Through the chinks

Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time

Sprang sublime,

And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced

As they raced,

And the monarch and his minions and his dames

Viewed the games.

V.

And I know-while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave

To their folding, all our many tinkling fleece

In such peace,

And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away-

That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair

Waits me there

In the turret whence the charioteers caught sol

For the goal,

When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb

Till I come.

VI.

But he looked upon the city, every side,

Far and wide,

All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades
Colonnades,

All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,—and then,

All the men!

When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand
Either hand

On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace

Of my face,

Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech

Each on each.

VII.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,

And they built their gous a brazen pillar high

As the sky,

Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force

Gold, of course.

Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!

Earth's returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!

Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.

The supreme value of love is a constantly recurring thought in the poems of our author. We shall meet it in its higher ranges in selections to come. Here we are still in the sphere of the mere earthly affection, with only the suggestion, in contrast with the transitoriness of earthly glory, of its indestructibility.

No explanation seems needed, excepting perhaps to call attention to this, that the "little turret" in stanza 4 is not a bartizan, but a staircase turret, or it could not " mark the basement, whence a tower in ancient time sprang sublime."

Observe, in each stanza, the striking contrast between the former and the latter half, so balanced that the poem might be divided into fourteen single or six double stanzas.

There is not much of the descriptive in the poems of our author; he is the poet, not of Nature, but of Human Nature; but when he does touch landscape, as here, it is with the hand of a master.

ALL that I know

Of a certain star

Is, it can throw

MY STAR.

(Like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red,

Now a dart of blue;

Till my friends have said

They would fain see, too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled :

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

The following sentence, from Walter Besant, in "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," well expresses the key-thought of this little gem of a poem: “So great is the beauty of human nature, even in its second rate or third rate productions, that love generally follows when one of the two, by confession or unconscious self-betrayal, stands revealed to the other."

Compare also the closing stanzas of "One Word More," especially stanza 18.

RUDEL TO THE LADY OF TRIPOLI.

I.

I KNOW a Mount, the gracious Sun perceives
First, when he visits, last, too, when he leaves
The world; and, vainly favoured, it repays
The day-long glory of his steadfast gaze
By no change of its large calm front of snow.
And, underneath the Mount, a Flower I know,
He cannot have perceived, that changes ever
At his approach; and, in the lost endeavour
To live his life, has parted, one by one,
With all a flower's true graces, for the grace
Of being but a foolish mimic sun,

With ray-like florets round a disk-like face.
Men nobly call by many a name the Mount
As over many a land of theirs its large
Calm front of snow like a triumphal targe

Is reared, and still with old names, fresh names vie,
Each to its proper praise and own account :
Men call the Flower, the Sunflower, sportively.

II.

Oh, Angel of the East, one, one gold look
Across the waters to this twilight nook,
—The far sad waters, Angel, to this nook!