Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door.
Come away, children, call no more!

Come away, come down, call no more!

Down, down, down!

Down to the depths of the sea!

She sits at her wheel in the humming town,

Singing most joyfully.

Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy,

For the humming street, and the child with its toy!

For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;

For the wheel where I spun,

And the blessed light of the sun!"

And so she sings her fill,

Singing most joyfully,

Till the spindle drops from her hand,

And the whizzing wheel stands still.

She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,

And over the sand at the sea;

And her eyes are set in a stare ;

And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,

A long, long sigh,

For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.

Come away, away, children;
Come, children, come down!
The hoarse wind blows colder;
Lights shine in the town.
She will start from her slumber
When gusts shake the door:

She will hear the winds howling,
Will hear the waves roar.

We shall see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,

A pavement of pearl.

Singing, "Here came a mortal,

But faithless was she!
And alone dwell forever
The kings of the sea."

But, children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow,
When clear falls the moonlight,
When spring-tides are low;
When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starred with broom,
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanched sands a gloom;
Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,

Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.

We will gaze, from the sand-hills,

At the white sleeping town;
At the church on the hill-side,
And then come back down,
Singing, "There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!

She left lonely forever

The kings of the sea."

SONNETS.

AUSTERITY OF POETRY.

THAT SON of Italy who tried to blow,8
Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song,
In his light youth amid a festal throng
Sate with his bride to see a public show.

Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow
Youth like a star; and what to youth belong,
Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong.
A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! Lo,

Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay!
Shuddering, they drew her garments off and found.
A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.

Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.

A PICTURE AT NEWSTEAD.

WHAT made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell? 'Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry Stormily sweet, his Titan-agony;

It was the sight of that Lord Arundel

169

Who struck, in heat, his child he loved so well,
And his child's reason flickered, and did die.
Painted (he willed it) in the gallery

They hang; the picture doth the story tell.

Behold the stern, mailed father, staff in hand!
The little fair-haired son, with vacant gaze,
Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are!

Methinks the woe, which made that father stand
Baring his dumb remorse to future days,
Was woe than Byron's woe more tragic far.

RACHEL.

I.

IN Paris all looked hot and like to fade;

Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries,

Sere with September, drooped the chestnut-trees; 'Twas dawn, a brougham rolled through the streets, and made

Halt at the white and silent colonnade

Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,
Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,

Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls surveyed.

She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled

To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;
Why stops she by this empty playhouse drear?

Ah! where the spirit its highest life hath led,
All spots, matched with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel's Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!

II.

UNTO a lonely villa, in a dell

Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore,
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore

Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,
The rose-crowned queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia, full on her death-bed. 'Twas well!
The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life's last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate's frowns,
Do for this radiant Greek-souled artist cease:
Sole object of her dying eyes remain

The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.

III.

SPRUNG from the blood of Israel's scattered race,
At a mean inn in German Aarau born,

To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face,

Imparting life renewed, old classic grace;
Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place,
"Ah! not the radiant spirit of Greece alone

She had one power, which made her breast its home.
In her, like us, there clashed, contending powers,

Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.