XLVII.

If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,

Were taken to be such as closed

Grave doubts and answers here proposed, Then these were such as men might scorn:

Her care is not to part and prove ;

She takes, when harsher moods remit, What slender shade of doubt may flit, And makes it vassal unto love:

And hence, indeed, she sports with words;
But better serves a wholesome law,

And holds it sin and shame to draw
The deepest measure from the chords:

Nor dare she trust a larger lay,

But rather loosens from the lip

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip

Their wings in tears, and skim away.

XLVIII.

FROM art, from nature, from the schools,
Let random influences glance,

Like light in many a shivered lance
That breaks about the dappled pools :

The lightest wave of thought shall lisp,
The fancy's tenderest eddy wreathe,
The slightest air of song shall breathe,

To make the sullen surface crisp.

And look thy look, and go thy way,

But blame not thou the winds that make
The seeming-wanton ripple break,

The tender-pencilled shadow play.

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears,

Ay me! the sorrow deepens down, Whose muffled motions blindly drown The bases of my life in tears.

XLIX.

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is racked with pangs that conquer trust,
And time, a maniac, scattering dust,

And life, a Fury, slinging flame.

Be near me when my

faith is dry,

And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,

And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife,
And on the low, dark verge of life

The twilight of eternal day.

L.

Do we indeed desire the dead

ཝཱ

Should still be near us at our side?

Is there no baseness we would hide? No inner vileness that we dread ?

Shall he for whose applause I strove,

I had such reverence for his blame, See with clear eye some hidden shame, And I be lessened in his love?

I

wrong the grave with fears untrue:

Shall love be blamed for want of faith?

There must be wisdom with great Death; The dead shall look me through and through.

Be near us when we climb or fall :

Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours

With larger, other eyes

than ours,

To make allowance for us all.

LI.

I CANNOT love thee as I ought,

For love reflects the thing beloved;

My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought.

"Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song," The Spirit of true love replied;

"Thou canst not move me from thy side,

Nor human frailty do me wrong.

"What keeps a spirit wholly true

To that ideal which he bears?

What record? not the sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian blue;

"So fret not, like an idle girl,

That life is dashed with flecks of sin.

Abide thy wealth is gathered in,

:

When Time hath sundered shell from pearl."