The key, O Tuscans, too well fits the wards! Ye asked for mimes,-these bring you tragedies: For purple, these shall wear it as your lords. Ye played like children,—die like innocents. Ye mimicked lightnings with a torch,—the crack Of the actual bolt, your pastime circumvents. Ye called up ghosts, believing they were slack To follow any voice from Gilboa's tents, Here's Samuel!—and, so, Grand-dukes come back!
What was he doing, the great God Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great God Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river: The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a-dying lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great God Pan, While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great God can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great God Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
'This is the way, laughed the great God Pan, (Laughed while he sat by the river,) 'The only way, since Gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.' Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great God Pan! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great God Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man:
The true Gods sigh for the cost and pain,- For the reed which grows never more again As a reed with the reeds in the river.
THE FORCED RECRUIT. SOLFERINO, 1859.
In the ranks of the Austrian you found him, He died with his face to you all; Yet bury him here where around him You honour your bravest that fall. Venetian, fair-featured and slender,
He lies shot to death in his youth, With a smile on his lips, over-tender For any mere soldier's dead mouth. No stranger, and yet not a traitor,
Though alien the cloth on his breast, Underneath it how seldom a greater Young heart, has a shot sent to rest! By your enemy tortured and goaded
To march with them, stand in their file, His musket (see) never was loaded, He facing your guns with that smile!
As orphans yearn on to their mothers, He yearned to your patriot bands ;- 'Let me die for our Italy, brothers,
If not in your ranks, by your hands! 'Aim straightly, fire steadily! spare me A ball in the body which may Deliver my heart here, and tear me
This badge of the Austrian away!'
So thought he, so died he this morning. What then? many others have died. Ay, but easy for men to die scorning
The death-stroke, who fought side by side:— One tricolor floating above them;
Struck down 'mid triumphant acclaims
Of an Italy rescued to love them
And blazon the brass with their names.
But he without witness or honour,
There, shamed in his country's regard, With the tyrants who march in upon her, Died faithful and passive: 't was hard. 'T was sublime. In a cruel restriction Cut off from the guerdon of sons, With most filial obedience, conviction,
His soul kissed the lips of her guns.
That moves you? Nay, grudge not to show it, While digging a grave for him here:
The others who died, says your poet, Have glory, let him have a tear.
I had a little chamber in the house,
As green as any privet-hedge a bird
Might choose to build in, though the nest itself
Could show but dead brown sticks and straws; the walls
Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight
Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds Hung green about the window which let in The out-door world with all its greenery. You could not push your head out and escape A dash of dawn-dew from the honey-suckle, But so you were baptized into the grace And privilege of seeing.
(I had enough there, of the lime, be sure,- My morning-dream was often hummed away By the bees in it); past the lime, the lawn, Which, after sweeping broadly round the house, Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself
Among the acacias, over which you saw
The irregular line of elms by the deep lane
Which stopped the grounds and dammed the overflow Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight
The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp
Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales
Could guess if lady's hall or tenant's lodge
Dispensed such odours,-though his stick well-crooked Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms, And through their tops, you saw the folded hills Striped up and down with hedges (burly oaks Projecting from the line to show themselves) Through which my cousin Romney's chimney smoked As still as when a silent month in frost
Breathes, showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall; While, far above, a jut of table-land,
A promontory without water stretched,
You could not catch it if the days were thick,
Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise,
The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve
And use it for an anvil till he had filled
The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts, Protesting against night and darkness :—then, When all his setting trouble was resolved
To a trance of passive glory, you might see In apparition on the golden sky
(Alas, my Giotto's background!) the sheep run Along the fine clear outline, small as mice That run along a witch's scarlet thread.
THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND.
I learnt to love that England. Very oft, Before the day was born, or otherwise Through secret windings of the afternoons, I threw my hunters off and plunged myself Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag Will take the waters, shivering with the fear And passion of the course. And when at last Escaped, so many a green slope built on slope Betwixt me and the evening's house behind, I dared to rest, or wander, in a rest Made sweeter for the step upon the grass, And view the ground's most gentle dimplement, (As if God's finger touched, but did not press In making England) such an up and down Of verdure, nothing too much up or down, A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop so tenderly and the wheatfields climb; Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises, Fed full of noises by invisible streams; And open pastures where you scarcely tell White daisies from white dew,—at intervals The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,— I thought my father's land was worthy too Of being my Shakespeare's.
Ofter we walked only two,
If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.
We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced.
We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched:
Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,
And thinkers disagreed, he, overfull
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