English

Adieu to kindred hearts and home,
To pleasure, joy, and mirth!
A fitter foot than mine to roam
Could scarcely tread the earth;
For they are now so few indeed
(Not more than three in all)
Who e'er will think of me, or heed
What fate may me befall.

For I through pleasure's paths have run
My headlong goal to win,
Nor pleasure's snares have cared to shun
When pleasure sweetened sin.
Let those who will their failings mask,
To mine I frankly own;
But for them pardon will I ask
Of none—save Heaven alone.

Only the footprints of the partridge run
Over the billowy drifts of the mountain-side;
And now on level wings the brown birds glide,
Following the snowy curves, and in the sun
Bright birds of gold above the stainless white
They move, and as their pale blue shadows move,
With them my heart glides on in golden flight
Over the hills of quiet to my love.

Storm-shaken, racked with terror through the long
Tempestuous night, in the quiet blue of morn
Love drinks the crystal airs, and peace newborn

Sheathed in scales of silver sequins,
In a blue pool of limelight dancing,
She twists and twirls and smiles and beckons
With dark eyes glancing—

She beckons to me in my skyey seat
With smiling teeth and dark eyes glancing:
But I only see as I watch her dancing
The shadows that seek to tangle her feet.

Stuck in a bottle on the window-sill,
In the cold gaslight burning gaily red
Against the luminous blue of London night,
These flowers are mine: while somewhere out of sight
In some black-throated alley's stench and heat,
Oblivious of the racket of the street,
A poor old weary woman lies in bed.

Broken with lust and drink, blear-eyed and ill,
Her battered bonnet nodding on her head,
From a dark arch she clutched my sleeve and said:
“I've sold no bunch to-day, nor touched a bite …
Son, buy six-penn'orth: and 'twill mean a bed.”

They found you nigh the foot of Roman's Leap,
Deep-buried in the bracken's rustling gold,
Your arm beneath you bent, your brown face cold:
Yet all unheeding round you grazed your sheep.

They found you nigh the foot of Roman's Leap:
They laid you on a hurdle, bracken-strewn:
They bore you home beneath the waning moon,
With laboured breathing up the craggy steep.

They found you nigh the foot of Roman's Leap:
Their whispering shadows darkened in the door:
Their griding hobnails crossed the sanded floor

Tell me what is
The Judgment Day?
It is when unto God
You dream away.

Between our eastward and our westward sea
The narrowing strand
Clasps close the noblest shore fame holds in fee
Even here where English birth seals all men free—
Northumberland.

The sea-mists meet across it when the snow
Clothes moor and fell,
And bid their true-born hearts who love it glow
For joy that none less nobly born may know
What love knows well.

The splendour and the strength of storm and fight
Sustain the song
That filled our fathers' hearts with joy to smite,

Jove is no proper lover, that I know;
Or else he'd change and come again below.
Leda, Europa, Danaë were fair,
But none with my proud beauty could compare:
Perhaps he scorns a lass who can be bought,
And only to princesses pays his court.

Now to the right, now to the left I turn;
Her place is empty—and I burn.
I twist, and toss, and turn again
Rest brings no respite to my pain.
And restless still I shall abide
Until I have Gemella by my side.

This wreath of flowers that bids thee wait
A moment at the trellised gate
Shall lure thee to enchanted ground
Where all the singing birds are found,
Where flows the fount that never fails,
The Garden of the Nightingales!

—Behold the slender star that lifts
The fringe of Winter's narrowing drifts;
The violet that with open wings
Lights where the first-born verdure springs;
The bell-wort, swinging in the breeze
As if to call the wandering bees
To taste the honeyed lymph that shines
Globed in the clustering columbines.