_To Gwenllian E. F. Morgan._

TO HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.

Young father-poet! much in you I praise Adventure high, romantic, vehement, All with inviolate honour sealed and blent, To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays: Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays; And, most, your verse, with strict imperious bent, Heard sweetly as from some old harper’s tent, And surging in the listener’s brain for days. At Framlingham to-night, if there should be No guest, beyond a sea-born wind that sighs, No guard, save moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears, And I, your pilgrim, call you, O let me In at the gate! and smile into the eyes That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.

FOR IZAAK WALTON.

Can trout allure the rod of yore In Itchen stream to dip? Or lover of her banks restore That sweet Socratic lip? Old fishing and wishing Are over many a year. O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Again the foamy shallows fill, The quiet clouds amass, And soft as bees, by Catherine Hill At dawn the anglers pass, And follow the hollow, In boughs to disappear. O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Nay, rise not now, nor with them take One golden-freckled fool! Thy sons to-day bring each an ache For ancient arts to cool. But, father, lie rather Unhurt and idle near: O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

While thought of thee to men is yet A sylvan playfellow, Ne’er by thy marble they forget In pious cheer to go. As air falls, the prayer falls O’er kingly Winchester: O hush thee, O hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

A FOOT-NOTE TO A FAMOUS LYRIC.

True love’s own talisman, which here Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach, A steel-and-velvet Cavalier Gave to our Saxon speech:

Chief miracle of theme and touch That many envy and adore: I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more.

No critic born since Charles was king, But sighed in smiling, as he read: “Here’s theft of the supremest thing A poet might have said!”

Young knight and wit and beau, who won Mid war’s upheaval, ladies’ praise, Was’t well of you, ere you had done, To blight our modern bays?

O yet to you, whose random hand Struck from the dark whole gems like these, (Archaic beauty, never planned Nor reared by wan degrees,

Which leaves an artist poor, and Art An earldom richer all her years;) To you, dead on your shield apart, Be Ave! passed in tears.

’Twas virtue’s breath inflamed your lyre; Heroic from the heart it ran; Nor for the shedding of such fire Lives, since, a manlier man.

And till your strophe sweet and bold So lovely aye, so lonely long, Love’s self outdo, dear Lovelace! hold The parapets of song.

A MEMORY OF A BRECONSHIRE VALLEY.

—“Patulis ubi vallibus errans, Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater.” Ad Posteros.

I.

I followed thee, wild stream of Paradise, White Usk, forever showering the sunned bee In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree; And, all along, had magical surmise Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies, As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea, Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly The giant rollers form, and fall, and rise. Above thy poet’s dust, by yonder yew, Ere distance perished, ere a star began, His clear monastic measure, heard of few, Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran; And thou to me wert dear, because I knew The God who made thee gracious, and the man.

II.

If, by that second lover’s power controlled, In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o’erfills Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils, From distance unto distance trailing gold; If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold, Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills Gray hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills Diviner run thy shallows than of old;— If intellectual these, O name thy Vaughan Creator too: and close his memory keep, Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep; A play of thought more mystic than the dawn; And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.