THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT.

113

A sycophant to smug success?

Will the sweet sky and ocean broad
Be fine accomplices to fraud?

O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray :

Back, back to chaos, harlot Day!

MY GARDEN.

I could put my woods in song,

And tell what's there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.

In my plot no tulips blow,

Snow-loving pines and oaks instead ;

And rank the savage maples grow

From spring's faint flush to autumn red.

My garden is a forest ledge

Which older forests bound;

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,

Then plunge to depths profound.

Here once the Deluge ploughed,

Laid the terraces, one by one;

Ebbing later whence it flowed,

NIVERSITY

They bleach and dry in the sun.

OF

CALIFORNIA.

The sowers made haste to depart,

The wind and the birds which sowed it;

Not for fame, nor by rules of art,

Planted these, and tempests flowed it.

Waters that wash my garden side
Play not in Nature's lawful web,

They heed not moon or solar tide,
Five years elapse from flood to ebb.

Keen ears can catch a syllable,

As if one spake to another,

In the hemlocks tall, untamable,

And what the whispering grasses smother.

Eolian harps in the pine

Ring with the song of the Fates;

Infant Bacchus in the vine,

Far distant yet his chorus waits.

Canst thou copy in verse one chime
Of the wood-bell's peal and cry,
Write in a book the morning's prime,
Or match with words that tender sky?

Wonderful verse of the gods,

Of one import, of varied tone;

They chant the bliss of their abodes

To man imprisoned in his own.

Ever the words of the gods resound;

But the porches of man's ear

Seldom in this low life's round

Are unsealed, that he may hear.

Wandering voices in the air,

And murmurs in the wold,

Speak what I cannot declare,

Yet cannot all withhold.

When the shadow fell on the lake,

The whirlwind in ripples wrote

Air-bells of fortune that shine and break,

And omens above thought.

But the meanings cleave to the lake,
Cannot be carried in book or urn;
Go thy ways now, come later back,
On waves and hedges still they burn.