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!

...

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.

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!

I had

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.

[From Aurora Leigh.]

AURORA'S HOME

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.

First, the lime,

(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