Turn full their soul to that which thou desirest,
Nor seek to gain thy goal,

Beauty, the heart of beauty,

The sweetness, yea, the thoughtful sweetness,

The one right way in each, the best,

Which satisfies the soul,

The firmness lost in softness, the touch of typical meetness, Which lets the soul have rest;

Those things to which thyself aspirest:

That they, though born to quaff the bowl divine,

As thou art, yield to the strict law of duty;

And thou from them must thine example take,
Leave the amaranthine vine,

And the prized joy forsake.

Oh thou, forgone in this,

Long struggling with a world that is amiss,
Reach some old volume down,

Some poet's book, which in thy bygone years,

Thou hast consumed with joys as keen as fears,

When o'er it thou wouldst hang with rapturous frown,
Admiring with sweet envy all

The exquisite of words, the lance-like fall

Of mighty verses, each on each,

The sweetness which did never cloy,

(So wrought of thought ere touched with speech),

And ask again, Hast thou no right to joy?

Take the most precious tones that thunderstruck thine ears

In gentler days gone by:

And if they yield no more the old ecstasy,

Then give thyself to tears.

ODE: THE SPIRIT WOOED

Art thou gone so far,

Beyond the poplar tops, beyond the sunset-bar,
Beyond the purple cloud that swells on high
In the tender fields of sky?

Leanest thou thy head

On sunset's golden breadth? is thy wide hair spread
To his solemn kisses? Yet grow thou not pale

As he pales and dies: nor more my eyes avail

To search his cloud-drawn bed.

O come thou again!

Be seen on the falling slope: let thy footsteps pass
Where the river cuts with his blue scythe the grass:
Be heard in the voice that across the river comes
From the distant wood, even when the stilly rain
Is made to cease by light winds: come again,
As out of yon grey glooms,

When the cloud grows luminous and shiftily riven,
Forth comes the moon, the sweet surprise of heaven:
And her footfall light

Drops on the multiplied wave: her face is seen

In evening's pallor green:

And she waxes bright

With the death of the tinted air: yea, brighter grows

In sunset's gradual close.

To earth from heaven comes she,

So come thou to me.

Oh, lay thou thy head

On sunset's breadth of gold, thy hair bespread
In his solemn kisses: but grow thou not pale

As he pales and dies, lest eye no more avail

To search thy cloud-drawn bed.

Can the weeping eye

Always feel light through mists that never dry!
Can empty arms alone for ever fill

Enough the breast? Can echo answer still,
When the voice has ceased to cry?

ODE ON ADVANCING AGE

Thou goest more and more

To the silent things: thy hair is hoar,
Emptier thy weary face: like to the shore
Far-ruined, and the desolate billow white,

That recedes and leaves it waif-wrinkled, gap-rocked, weak.
The shore and the billow white

Groan, they cry and rest not: they would speak,
And call the eternal Night

To cease them for ever, bidding new things issue
From her cold tissue:

Night, that is ever young, nor knows decay,

Though older by eternity than they.

Go down upon the shore.

The breakers dash, the smitten spray drops to the roar;

The spit upsprings, and drops again,

Where'er the white waves clash in the main.

Their sound is but one: 'tis the cry

That has risen from of old to the sky,

'Tis their silence!

Go now from the shore

Far-ruined: the grey shingly floor

To thy crashing step answers, the doteril cries,
And on dipping wing flies:

'Tis their silence!

And thou, oh thou,

To that wild silence sinkest now.

No more remains to thee than the cry of silence, the cry Of the waves, of the shore, of the bird to the sky.

Thy bald eyes neath as bald a brow

Ask but what Nature gives

To the inarticulate cries

Of the waves, of the shore, of the bird.
Earth in earth thou art being interred:
No longer in thee lives

The lordly essence which was unlike all,

That was thy flower of soul the imperial
Glory that separated thee

From all others that might be.

Thy dog hath died before.

Didst thou not mark him? did he not neglect

What roused his rapture once, but still loved thee?
Till, weaker grown, was he not fain reject

Thy pitying hand, thy meat and drink,
For all thou couldst implore?

Then, at the last, how mournfully

Did not his eyelids sink

With wearied sighs?

He sought at last that never-moving night
Which is the same in darkness as in light,
The closing of the eyes.

So, Age, thou dealest us

To the elements: but no! Resume thy pride,
O man, that musest thus.

Be to the end what thou hast been before:

The ancient joy shall wrap thee still-the tide
Return upon the shore.

THOMAS GORDON HAKE

[BORN 1809, of an old Devonshire family on the father's side, his mother being a Gordon, aunt of Gordon of Khartoum. Educated at Lewes, at St. George's Hospital, and at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, where he acquired remarkable medical and surgical knowledge. His very lively Memoirs of Eighty Years, published 1892, show that during the first half of his long life his mind was occupied with these studies; and, except for one or two youthful ventures in verse and prose-the drama called Piromides and the romance Vates-he gave himself up to science, not to poetry. In 1866, however, he privately printed The World's Epitaph, which led to an intimacy with D. G. Rossetti and his group of friends. His medical assistance made him for some years, as W. M. Rossetti said, "the earthly Providence of the Rossetti family.' On the other hand, their influence helped forward his revived poetical instincts, and between 1872 and 1890 he wrote and published many volumes of verse, including Madeline (1871), Parables and Tales (1872), New Symbols (1876), and The New Day (1890); and in 1894 Mrs. Meynell printed a volume of Selections from his works, with a preface. He died in January, 1895.]

Thomas Gordon Hake was a man of many experiences, many accomplishments, and many moods. In manner he was "polished and urbane;" in aspect, according to his friend Theodore WattsDunton, to whom Hake dedicated his New Day, he was, "with the single exception of Lord Tennyson, the most poetical-looking poet" his friend had ever seen. Till past middle life he was a practising physician, the author of several learned books and papers, and a votary of Nature-study. But from eleven years old he had been a student of Shakespeare, and one side of him, from boyhood onwards, was passionately devoted to poetry; so that when, at the age of nearly sixty, leisure, travels in Italy, and the beauty of some English woods in spring had made him take seriously to the writing of verse, none of his few intimate friends was surprised at the high standard that he reached at once. One reader, who was as yet a stranger to him, was so charmed that, immediately they were introduced, the two became close friends; and to this friendship Hake may be said to have owed a strong