For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect

of the rose,

Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too

full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensi

tive nose,

From which I escaped heart-free, with the least

little touch of spleen.

III.

COLD and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly

meek,

Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was

drown'd,

Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on

the cheek,

Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom

profound;

Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient

wrong

Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as

pale as before

Growing and fading and growing upon me without

a sound,

Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the

night long

Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear

it no more,

But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,

Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,

Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave,

Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer,

and found

The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his

grave.

IV.

1.

A MILLION emeralds break from the ruby-budded

lime

In the little grove where I sit--ah, wherefore

cannot I be

Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful

season bland,

When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a

softer clime,

Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent

of sea,

The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the

land?

2.

Below me, there, is the village, and looks how quiet and small!

And yet bubbles o'er like a city, with gossip, scandal, and spite;

And Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies

as a Czar;

And here on the landward side, by a red rock, glimmers the Hall;

And up in the high Hall-garden I see her pass

like a light;

But sorrow seize me if ever that light be my

leading star!

3.

When have I bow'd to her father, the wrinkled

head of the race?

I met her to-day with her brother, but not to her

brother I bow'd;