Chapter I: FOLLOWED thee, wild stream of Paradise,

White Usk, for ever 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 breakers 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
Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills
Diviner run thy shallows than of old;--

If intellectual these, Oh! name my 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.

_A Song of Far Travel_

MANY a time some drowsy oar from the nearer bank invited,
Crossed a narrow stream, and bore in among the reeds moon-lighted,
There to leave me on a shore no ferryman hath sighted.

Many a time a mountain stile, dark and bright with sudden wetting,
Lured my vagrant foot the while 'twixt uplifting and down-setting,--
Whither? Thousand mile on mile, beyond the last forgetting.

Long by hidden ways I wend (past occasion grown a ranger);
Yet enchantment, like a friend, takes from death the tang of danger:
Hardly river or road can end where I need step a stranger.

_Spring_

_With a difference._--HAMLET.

AGAIN the bloom, the northward flight,
The fount freed at its silver height,
And down the deep woods to the lowest
The fragrant shadows scarred with light.

O inescapeable joy of Spring!
For thee the world shall leap and sing;
But by her darkened door thou goest
Henceforward as a spectral thing.

_The Colour-Bearer_

THY charge was: "Hold My banner
Against our hidden foe;
To war where sounds no manner
Of glorious music, go!"
And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."

Ah, not to brave Thy censure
But win Thy smile of light,
My heart of misadventure
Will end in the losing fight,
And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.

The day will pass of torment,
The evenfall be sweet
When I shall wear for garment
The nakedness of defeat.
But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet

That eagle of the wartime,
That oriflamme, outrolled
With strength of staff aforetime,
With cleanly and costly fold,--
Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,

And take from me (turned donor
That night on blood-soaked sand),
The stick and rag of Honour
There safe in a stiffened hand,
Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.

_Sanctuary_

HIGH above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay's footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.

Hither Felicity
Doth climb to me,
And bank me in with turf and marjoram
Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
With golden barberry-wreath,
And bluets thick beneath;
One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
With bud-red breast,
Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
Float less than April fog below our hermitage.

_Emily Brontë_

WHAT sacramental hurt that brings
The terror of the truth of things
Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
'Twas thine, upon a headland set,
To view no isles of man's delight,
With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.

_Pascal_

THOU lovedst life, but not to brand it thine
(O rich in all forborne felicities!),
Nor use it with marauding power, to seize
And stain the sweet earth's blue horizon-line.
Virgin the grape might in the trellis twine
Where thou hadst long ago an hour of ease,
And foot of thine across the unpressed leas
Went light as some Idæan foot divine.

Spirit so abstinent, in thy deeps lay
What passion of possession? Day by day
Was there no thirst upon thee, sharp and pure,
In forward sea-like surges unforgot?
Yes: and in life and death those joys endure
More blessedly, that men can name them not.

_Borderlands_

THROUGH all the evening,
All the virginal long evening,
Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;
For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;
And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,
Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

Yet in the valley,
At a turn of the orchard alley,
When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!

_Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore_

THERE in his room, whene'er the moon looks in,
To silver now a shell, and now a fin,
And o'er his chart glide like an argosy,
Quiet and old sits he.
Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast,
Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?

Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold
Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,
The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss
Their veering weight across.
On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled,
To lands where stunted cedars throw
A lace-like shadow over snow,
Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

Again play up and down the briny spar
Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar,
Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,
The Labradorian blue;
All homeless hurricanes about him break;
The purples of spent day he sees
From Samos to the Hebrides,
And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,
Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,
Away, and far away, his barque is borne
Riding the noisy morn,
Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know
The helm and tightening halyards still
Follow the urging of his will,
And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high,
And shackles him with many an inland tie,
And of his only wisdom makes a jibe
Amid an alien tribe:
No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.
The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!
Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?
Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,
Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him!
Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole
Unto his subject soul,
Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,
Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,
But she may know that voice again,
And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

And give him back, before his passion fail,
The singing cordage and the hollow sail,
And level with those ageing eyes let be
The bright unsteady sea;
And like a film remove from sense and brain
This pasture wall, these boughs that run
Their evening arches to the sun,
Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

And on the shut space and the shallow hour,
Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,
With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,
Him whom thou lovedst, bring:
That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,
Not having, at the last, less grace
Of thee than had his roving race,
Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.

OXFORD AND LONDON