But any man that walks the mead

2050 In bud or blade, or bloom, may find, According as his humors lead,

A meaning suited to his mind. And liberal applications lie

In Art like Nature, dearest friend; z/0

So 't were to cramp its use, if I

Should hook it to some useful end.

L'ENVOI.

You shake your head. A random string
Your finer female sense offends.

Well were it not a pleasant thing 215

Το

To fall asleep with all one's friends;

pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men ;

And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again; 226

To sleep through terms of mighty wars,

And wake on science grown to more,

On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore;

VOL. II.

And all that else the years will show, 22

The Poet-forms of stronger hours,

The vast Republics that may grow,

The Federations and the Powers;
Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes ;
For we are Ancients of the earth,

And in the morning of the times.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep

230

Through sunny decades new and strange,
Or gay quinquenniads, would we reap 23
The flower and quintessence of change.

Ah, yet would I—and would I might!
So much your eyes my fancy take —
Be still the first to leap to light,

That I might kiss those eyes awake!
For, am I right or am I wrong,

To choose your own you did not care;
You'd have my moral from the song,
And I will take my pleasure there:

And, am I right or am I wrong,

246

241

My fancy, ranging through and through,
To search a meaning for the song,

Perforce will still revert to you;

7

Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curled, 250

And evermore a costly kiss,

The prelude to some brighter world.

For since the time when Adam first

Embraced his Eve in happy hour,

And

every

bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower,

255

What eyes, like thine, have wakened hopes?
What lips, like thine, so sweetly joined?
Where on the double rosebud droops
The fulness of the pensive mind; 260
Which all too dearly self-involved,

Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;

A sleep by kisses undissolved,

That lets thee neither hear nor see: But break it. In the name of wife, 265

And in the rights that name may give,

Are clasped the moral of thy life,

And that for which I care to live.

EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there, 270 O whisper to your glass, and say,

"What wonder, if he thinks me fair?" What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight, Like long-tailed birds of Paradise, 275

That float through Heaven, and cannot light? Or old-world trains, upheld at court

By Cupid-boys of blooming hue —

But take it earnest wed with sport,

And either sacred unto you.

280

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,

A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren:

Yet say the neighbors when they call,

It is not bad but good land,

And in it is the germ of all

That

grows within the woodland. 8

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,

And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion !

And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

And fiddled in the timber! 6