(T. T.)

When I remember, friend, whom lost I call, Because a man beloved is taken hence, The tender humour and the fire of sense In your good eyes; how full of heart for all, And chiefly for the weaker by the wall, You bore that lamp of sane benevolence; Then see I round you Death his shadows dense Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall. For surely are you one with the white host, Spirits, whose memory in our vital air Through the great love of Earth they had: lo, these, Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas, Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost, Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.

MY THEME.

Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt: The song of gladness one straight bolt can check. But I have never stood at Fortune’s beck: Were she and her light crew to run atilt At my poor holding little would be spilt; Small were the praise for singing o’er that wreck. Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck; He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt. Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell With other than those votaries she deals The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift. I say but that this love of Earth reveals A soul beside our own to quicken, quell, Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.

MY THEME: CONTINUED.

’Tis true the wisdom that my mind exacts Through contemplation from a heart unbent By many tempests may be stained and rent: The summer flies it mightily attracts. Yet they seem choicer than your sons of facts, Which scarce give breathing of the sty’s content For their diurnal carnal nourishment: Which treat with Nature in official pacts. The deader body Nature could proclaim. Much life have neither. Let the heavens of wrath Rattle, then both scud scattering to froth. But during calms the flies of idle aim Less put the spirit out, less baffle thirst For light than swinish grunters, blest or curst.

TIME AND SENTIMENT.

I see a fair young couple in a wood, And as they go, one bends to take a flower, That so may be embalmed their happy hour And in another day, a kindred mood, Haply together, or in solitude, Recovered what the teeth of Time devour, The joy, the bloom, and the illusive power, Wherewith by their young blood they are endued To move all enviable, framed in May, And of an aspect sisterly with Truth: Yet seek they with Time’s laughing things to wed: Who will be prompted on some pallid day To lift the hueless flower and show that dead, Even such, and by this token, is their youth.

PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS.

The measure runs:

MELAMPUS.

LOVE IN THE VALLEY:

Trochaic, variable in short syllables according to stress of the accent.

A sketch of this poem appeared in a volume published many years back, now extinct.