Obiit MDCCCXXXIII, LXXXVI–XCII

Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, Rings Eden through the budded quicks, O tell me where the senses mix, O tell me where the passions meet,

Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ Thy spirits in the dusking leaf, And in the midmost heart of grief Thy passion clasps a secret joy:

And I—my harp would prelude woe— I cannot all command the strings; The glory of the sum of things Will flash along the chords and go.

Witch-elms that counterchange the floor Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright: And thou, with all thy breadth and height Of foliage, towering sycamore;

How often, hither wandering down, My Arthur found your shadows fair, And shook to all the liberal air The dust and din and steam of town:

He brought an eye for all he saw; He mixt in all our simple sports; They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts And dusky purlieus of the law.

O joy to him in this retreat, Immantled in ambrosial dark, To drink the cooler air, and mark The landscape winking through the heat:

O sound to rout the brood of cares, The sweep of scythe in morning dew, The gust that round the garden flew, And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

O bliss, when all in circle drawn About him, heart and ear were fed To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poets on the lawn:

Or in the all-golden afternoon A guest, or happy sister, sung, Or here she brought the harp and flung A ballad to the brightening moon:

Nor less it pleased in livelier moods, Beyond the bounding hill to stray, And break the livelong summer day With banquet in the distant woods;

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme, Discuss’d the books to love or hate, Or touch’d the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream;

But if I praised the busy town, He loved to rail against it still, For ‘ground in yonder social mill We rub each other’s angles down,

And merge’ he said ‘in form and gloss The picturesque of man and man.’ We talk’d: the stream beneath us ran, The wine-flask lying couch’d in moss,

Or cool’d within the glooming wave And last, returning from afar, Before the crimson-circled star Had fall’n into her father’s grave,

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers, We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in the pail, And buzzings of the honied hours.

He tasted love with half his mind, Nor ever drank the inviolate spring Where nighest heaven, who first could fling This bitter seed among mankind;

That could the dead, whose dying eyes Were closed with wail, resume their life. They would but find in child and wife An iron welcome when they rise:

’Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine, To pledge them with a kindly tear: To talk them o’er, to wish them here, To count their memories half divine;

But if they came who past away, Behold their brides in other hands: The hard heir strides about their lands, And will not yield them for a day.

Yea, tho’ their sons were none of these, Not less the yet-lov’d sire would make Confusion worse than death, and shake The pillars of domestic peace.

Ah dear, but come thou back to me: Whatever change the years have wrought, I find not yet one lonely thought That cries against my wish for thee.

When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, And rarely pipes the mounted thrush; Or underneath the barren bush Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

Come, wear the form by which I know Thy spirit in time among thy peers; The hope of unaccomplish’d years Be large and lucid round thy brow.

When summer’s hourly-mellowing change May breathe with many roses sweet Upon the thousand waves of wheat, That ripple round the lonely grange;

Come: not in watches of the night, But where the sunbeam broodeth warm, Come, beauteous in thine after form, And like a finer light in light.

If any vision should reveal Thy likeness, I might count it vain As but the canker of the brain; Yea, though it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast Together in the days behind, I might but say, I hear a wind Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view A fact within the coming year; And tho’ the months, revolving near, Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies, But spiritual presentiments, And such refraction of events As often rises ere they rise.

I shall not see thee. Dare I say No spirit ever brake the band That stays him from the native land, Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay?

No visual shade of some one lost, But he, the Spirit himself, may come Where all the nerve of sense is numb; Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

O, therefore from thy sightless range With gods in unconjectured bliss, O, from the distance of the abyss Of tenfold-complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold Should be the man whose thought would hold An hour’s communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call The spirits from their golden day, Except, like them, thou too canst say My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast, Imaginations calm and fair, The memory like a cloudless air, The conscience as a sea at rest:

But when the heart is full of din, And doubt beside the portal waits, They can but listen at the gates And hear the household jar within.