LOVED-alas! our life is love;

But when we cease to breathe and

move

I do suppose love ceases too.

I thought, but not as now I do,

Keen thoughts and bright of linked lore,
Of all that men had thought before,
And all that nature shows, and more.

II.

And still I love and still I think,
But strangely, for my heart can drink
The dregs of such despair, and live,
And love;

And if I think, my thoughts come fast,

I mix the present with the past,

And each seems uglier than the last.

III.

Sometimes I see before me flee

A silver spirit's form, like thee,
O Leonora, and I sit

. . still watching it,

Till by the grated casement's ledge
It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge
Breathes o'er the breezy streamlet's edge.

Fragment: The Stream's Margin

HE fierce beasts of the woods and

wildernesses

Track not the steps of him who

drinks of it;

For the light breezes, which for ever fleet
Around its margin, heap the sand thereon.

Sonnet

IFT not the painted veil which

those who live

Call Life: though unreal shapes

be pictured there,

And it but mimic all we would believe

With colours idly spread,- behind lurk Fear And Hope, twin destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

I knew one who had lifted it he sought,

For his lost heart was tender, things to love,

But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could ap

prove.

Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Fragment: Appeal to

Silence

ILENCE! O well are Death and

Sleep and Thou

Three brethren named, the guar

dians gloomy-winged

Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy Are swallowed up—yet spare me, Spirit, pity

me,

Until the sounds I hear become my soul,
And it has left these faint and weary limbs,
To track along the lapses of the air
This wandering melody until it rests
Among lone mountains in some . . .

Passage of the Apennines

ISTEN, listen, Mary mine,
To the whisper of the Apennine,
It bursts on the roof like the

thunder's roar,

Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow

By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day

Is a mighty mountain dim and

gray,

Which between the earth and sky doth lay;

But when night comes, a chaos dread

On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the

storm.