'Not less sweetly for one blossom cancell'd from Spring!

Hast thou loved, O my heart? to thy love yet remains All the wide loving-kindness of nature. The plains 'And the hills with each summer their verdure renew. 'Wouldst thou be as they are? do thou then as they do, 'Let the dead sleep in peace. Would the living divine 'Where they slumber?

Let only new flowers be the sign!

'Vain! all vain! . . . For when, laughing, the wine I would quaff, 'I remember'd too well all it cost me to laugh.

'Through the revel it was but the old song I heard,

Through the crowd the old footsteps behind me they stirr'd,

In the night-wind, the starlight, the murmurs of even,
In the ardours of earth, and the languors of heaven,

'I could trace nothing more, nothing more through the spheres,
'But the sound of old sobs, and the tracks of old tears!
'It was with me the night long in dreaming or waking,
It abided in loathing, when daylight was breaking,
'The burthen of the bitterness in me! Behold,
'All my days were become as a tale that is told.
And I said to my sight, "No good thing shalt thou see,
'For the noonday is turned to darkness in me.

In the house of Oblivion my bed I have made." And I said to the grave, "Lo, my father!" and said 'To the worm, "Lo, my sister!" The dust to the dust, 'And one end to the wicked shall be with the just!'

VII.

He ceased, as a wind that wails out on the night,
And moans itself mute. Through the indistinct light
A voice clear, and tender, and pure with a tone

Of ineffable pity replied to his own.

And say you, and deem you, that I wreck'd your life? 'Alas! Duc de Luvois, had I been your wife

By a fraud of the heart which could yield you alone

For the love in your nature a lie in my own,

Should I not, in deceiving, have injured you worse?
Yes, I then should have merited justly your curse,
'For I then should have wrong'd you!'

'You could never have loved me?'

'Wrong'd! ah, is it so?

'Duke !'

'Never? oh no!

(He broke into a fierce angry laugh, as he said)

'Yet, lady, you knew that I loved you: you led

My love on to lay to its heart, hour by hour,

All the pale, cruel, beautiful, passionless power

'Shut up in that cold face of yours! was this well?

'But enough! not on you would I vent the wild hell

'Which has grown in my heart. Oh that man, first and last

'He tramples in triumph my life! he has cast

'His shadow 'twixt me and the sun 'My hate yet may find him!'

let it pass!

She murmur'd, 'Alas!

'These words, at least, spare me the

'Enough, Duc de Luvois! farewell.

pain of reply.

I shall try

To forget every word I have heard, every sight

'That has grieved and appall'd me in this wretched night 'Which must witness our final farewell. May you, Duke, 'Never know greater cause your own heart to rebuke 'Than mine thus to wrong and afflict you have had! 'Adieu !'

'Stay, Lucile, stay!' . . . he groaned, . . . 'I am mad, Brutalized, blind with pain! I know not what I said. 'I meant it not. But' (he moan'd, drooping his head) 'Forgive me! I have I so wrong'd you, Lucile? ' I . . . have I . . . forgive me, forgive me!'

'Only sad, very sad to the soul,' she said, 'far, 'Far too sad for resentment.'

'One moment,' he murmur'd.

'I feel

'Yet stand as you are
I think, could I gaze

Thus awhile on your face, the old innocent days 'Would come back upon me, and this scorching heart 'Free itself in hot tears. Do not, do not depart

Thus, Lucile! stay one moment.

I know why you shrink,

'Why you shudder; I read in your face what you think.

'Do not speak to me of it. And yet, if you will,

'Whatever you say, my own lips shall be still.

'I lied.

And the truth, now, could justify nought.

There are battles, it may be, in which to have fought

Is more shameful than, simply, to fail. Yet, Lucile, 'Had you help'd me to bear what you forced me to feel-' 'Could I help you,' she murmur'd, but what can I say 'That your life will respond to ?' My life?' he sigh'd. Nay, 'My life hath brought forth only evil, and there

The wild wind hath planted the wild weed yet ere

"You exclaim, "Fling the weed to the flames," think again

'Why the field is so barren. With all other men

'First love, though it perish from life, only goes

'Like the primrose that falls to make way for the rose. For a man, at least most men, may love on through life: 'Love in fame; love in knowledge; in work earth is rife 'With labour, and therefore with love, for a man.

Let that pass! Ambition?

If one love fails, another succeeds, and the plan 'Of man's life includes love in all objects! But I ? 'All such loves from my life through its whole destiny 'Fate excluded. The love that I gave you, alas! 'Was the sole love that life gave to me. 'It perish'd, and all perish'd with it. 'Wealth left nothing to add to my social condition. 'Fame ? But fame in itself presupposes some great 'Field wherein to pursue and attain it. The State? I, to cringe to an upstart? The Camp? I, to draw From its sheath the old sword of the Dukes of Luvois

To defend usurpation? Books, then? Science, Art?

'But, alas! I was fashion'd for action: my heart,
'Wither'd thing though it be, I should hardly compress

''Twixt the leaves of a treatise on Statics: life's stress

Needs scope, not contraction! what rests? to wear out 'At some dark northern court an existence, no doubt,

In wretched and paltry intrigues for a cause

'As hopeless as is my own life! By the laws

Of a fate I can neither control nor dispute, 'I am what I am!'

VIII.

For a while she was mute.

Then she answer'd, 'We are our own fates. Our own deeds

'Are our doomsmen.

" But men's actions.

Man's life was made not for men's creeds,
And, Duc de Luvois, I might say

'That all life attests, that "the will makes the way."

'Is the land of our birth less the land of our birth,

Or its claim the less strong, or its cause the less worth

'Our upholding, because the white lily no more

Is as sacred as all that it bloom'd for of yore?

'Yet be that as it may be; I cannot perchance

'Judge this matter. I am but a woman, and France
'Has for me simpler duties.
'De Luvois, should be yours.
'Otherwise it were devilish.

Large hope, though, Eugène
There is purpose in pain,

I trust in my soul

'That the great master hand which sweeps over the whole 'Of this deep harp of life, if at moments it stretch

'To shrill tension some one wailing nerve, means to fetch Its response the truest, most stringent, and smart,

'Its pathos the purest, from out the wrung heart,

'Whose faculties, flaccid it may be, if less

Sharply strung, sharply smitten, had fail'd to express

'Just the one note the great final harmony needs.

'And what best proves there's life in a heart?—that it bleeds!

'Grant a cause to remove, grant an end to attain,

'Grant both to be just, and what mercy in pain!

'Cease the sin with the sorrow! See morning begin!

'Pain must burn itself out if not fuell'd by sin.

ΕΕ

There is hope in yon hill-tops, and love in yon light. 'Let hate and despondency die with the night!'

He was moved by her words. As some poor wretch confined
In cells loud with meaningless laughter, whose mind
Wanders trackless amidst its own ruins, may hear

A voice heard long since, silenced many a year,

And now, 'mid mad ravings recaptured again,

Singing through the caged lattice a once well-known strain,
Which brings back his boyhood upon it, until

The mind's ruin'd crevices graciously fill
With music and memory, and, as it were,
The long-troubled spirit grows slowly aware

Of the mockery round it, and shrinks from each thing
It once sought,-the poor idiot who pass'd for a king,
Hard by, with his squalid straw crown, now confess'd
A madman more painfully mad than the rest,—
So the sound of her voice, as it there wander'd o'er
His echoing heart, seem'd in part to restore
The forces of thought he recaptured the whole
Of his life by the light which, in passing, her soul
Reflected on his he appear'd to awake

From a dream, and perceived he had dream'd a mistake:
His spirit was soften'd, yet troubled in him:

He felt his lips falter, his eyesight grow dim,

But he murmur'd...

'Lucile, not for me that sun's light

'Which reveals-not restores-the wild havoc of night.

'There are some creatures born for the night, not the day. 'Broken-hearted the nightingale hides in the spray,

'And the owl's moody mind in his own hollow tower
'Dwells muffled. Be darkness henceforward my dower.

'Light, be sure, in that darkness there dwells, by which eyes 'Grown familiar with ruins may yet recognize

'Enough desolation.'