Such letting nature have her way While heaven looks from its towers!

VII

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!

How is it under our control

To love or not to love?

VIII

I would that you were all to me,

You that are just so much, no more. Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!

Where does the fault lie? What the core O' the wound, since wound must be?

IX

I would I could adopt your will,

See with your eyes, and set my heart Beating by yours, and drink my fill

At your soul's springs,-—your part, my part In life, for good and ill.

X

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth,-I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak-
Then the good minute goes.

XI

Already how am I so far

Out of that minute? Must I go Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,

Onward, whenever light winds blow, Fixed by no friendly star?

XII

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again.
The old trick! Only I discern-
Infinite passion, and the pain
of finite hearts that yearn.

"DE GUSTIBUS—”

I

YOUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If our loves remain)

In an English lane,

By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice-
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,-

The happier they !

Draw yourself up from the light of the moon, And let them pass, as they will too soon,

With the beanflower's boon,

And the blackbird's tune,

And May, and June!

II

What I love best in all the world

Is a castle, precipice-encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands)—

In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree-'t is a cypress-stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands

To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day—the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:

-She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!

Queen Mary's saying serves for me

(When fortune's malice

Lost her, Calais)

Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, " Italy."

Such lovers old are I and she:

So it always was, so shall ever be.

THE GUARDIAN-ANGEL.

A PICTURE AT FANO.

DEAR and great Angel, wouldst thou only leave
That child, when thou hast done with him, for me!
Let me sit all the day here, that when eve

Shall find performed thy special ministry, And time come for departure, thou, suspending Thy flight, may'st see another child for tending, Another still to quiet and retrieve.

II

Then I shall feel thee step one step, no more,
From where thou standest now, to where I gaze.
—And suddenly my head is covered o'er

With those wings, white above the child who prays Now on that tomb-and I shall feel thee guarding Me, out of all the world; for me, discarding

Yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its door.

III

I would not look up thither past thy head

Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,

Thou bird of God! And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether

Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread?

IV

If this was ever granted, I would rest

My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast,

Pressing the brain which too much thought expands, Back to its proper size again, and smoothing Distortion down till every nerve had soothing, And all lay quiet, happy and suppressed.

V

How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired!
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes.

O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty:
And knowing this is love, and love is duty.
What further may be sought for or declared?

VI

Guercino drew this angel I saw teach

(Alfred, dear friend !)—that little child to pray, Holding the little hands up, each to each

Pressed gently,—with his own head turned away Over the earth where so much lay before him Of work to do, though heaven was opening o'er him, And he was left at Fano by the beach.

VII

We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there
And drink his beauty to our soul's content

-My angel with me too and since I care
For dear Guercino's fame (to which in power
And glory comes this picture for a dower,
Fraught with a pathos so magnificent)

VIII

And since he did not work thus earnestly

At all times, and has else endured some wrongI took one thought his picture struck from me, And spread it out, translating it to song.

My love is here. Where are you, dear old friend? How rolls the Wairoa at your world's far end? This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.

EVELYN HOPE.

I

BEAUTIFUL Evelyn Hope is dead!

Sit and watch by her side an hour.