Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height; To hear each other's whispered speech;

Eating the Lotos day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray,
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory
With those old faces of our infancy

Heaped over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,

And dear the last embraces of our wives

And their warm tears: but all hath suffered

change;

For surely now our household hearths are cold :

Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange :
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island-princes overbold

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings

Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle ?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile :

'Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto agèd breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,

1

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) With half-dropt eyelid still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill—

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave through the thick-twinèd vineTo watch the emerald-coloured water falling Through many a woven acanthus-wreath divine! Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek :
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Through every hollow cave and alley lone,

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow
Lotos-dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we,

1 See Odyssey, x. 305.

Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foamfountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,

Like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring

toil,

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and

oil;

Till they perish and they suffer

whispered, down in hell

- some, 'tis

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys

dwell,

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.1 Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander

more.

TENNYSON

130.-ESTRANGEMENT

THE path from me to you that led,
Untrodden long, with grass is grown,—
Mute carpet that his lieges spread
Before the Prince Oblivion
When he goes visiting the dead.

And who are they but who forget?
You, who my coming could surmise
Ere any hint of me as yet

Warned other ears and other eyes,
See the path blurred without regret.

But when I trace its windings sweet
With saddened steps, at every spot

That feels the memory in my feet,

Each grass-blade turns forget-me-not, Where murmuring bees your name repeat.

J. R. LOWELL

1 See Odyssey, xi. 539.

131. SONNETS

I

THE DELIGHT OF LOVE 1

XXVI

LORD of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul's thought, all naked will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect
And puts apparel on my tattered loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect :
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then not show my head where thou mayst
prove me.

XXIX

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state

1 The headings of these and similar groups make no attempt to solve the riddle of the Sonnets. They simply indicate the phases of the story that lies on their surface; the story of a passionate friendship, shadowed by the thought of death, darkened by estrangement, and finally made perfect in reunion, when the temple of "ruined love built anew, grows fairer than at first, more strong, far

greater."