Yet more! the billows and the depths have more! The battle-thunders will not break their rest. Give back the lost and lovely! those for whom To thee the love of woman hath gone down, Dark flow thy tides o'er manhood's noble head, O'er youth's bright locks, and beauty's flowery crown; Yet must thou hear a voice-Restore the dead! Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee ! Restore the dead, thou sea CLXXVII. ROBIN HOOD. TO A FRIEND. O! those days are gone away, No! JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821. And their hours are old and grey, And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Of the leaves of many years: Sounded tempests to the feast No, the bugle sounds no more, Past the heath and up the hill; On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Gone, the merry morris din ; Gone, the song of Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the 'grené shawe;' All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his tufted grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall'n beneath the dock-yard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; So it is; yet let us sing Honour to the woods unshorn ! And to all the Sherwood clan ! Though their days have hurried by, CLXXVIII. N a drear-nighted December, IN Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember The north cannot undo them With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them In a drear-nighted December, But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time. Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy; But were there ever any |