8.

Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age-why not? I have neither hope nor trust;

May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,

Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.

9.

Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,

When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like swine,

When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie

Peace in her vineyard-yes!—but a company forges the wine.

10.

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head,

Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,

While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,

And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.

11.

And Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villanous centre-bits

Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,

While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits

To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights.

12.

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,

And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,

Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea,

War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

13.

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill,

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the threedecker out of the foam,

That the smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter and till,

And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home.

14.

What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood?

Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die

Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood

On a horror of shatter'd limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?

15.

Would there be sorrow for me? there was love in the passionate shriek,

Love for the silent thing that had made false haste to the grave

Wrapt in a cloak, as I saw him, and thought he would rise and speak

And rave at the lie and the liar, ah God, as he used to rave.

16.

I am sick of the Hall and the hill, I am sick of the moor and the main.

Why should I stay? can a sweeter chance ever come to me here?

O, having the nerves of motion as well as the nerves of pain,

Were it not wise if I fled from the place and the pit and the fear?

17.

There are workmen up at the Hall: they are coming back from abroad;

The dark old place will be gilt by the touch of a millionnaire:

I have heard, I know not whence, of the singular beauty of Maud;

I play'd with the girl when a child; she promised then to be fair.

18.

Maud with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,

Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,

Maud with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes,

Maud the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all,—

19.

What is she now? My dreams are bad. She may bring me a curse.

No, there is fatter game on the moor; she will let me alone.

Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man be the worse.

I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his own.

II.

LONG have I sigh'd for a calm: God grant I may find it at last!

It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savor nor salt,

But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past,

Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had

not been

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 sensitive 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;