style="font-size:15px;"> I sang ere warmth did wane?Who thinks its numbers spell
His Amabel?”—
Knowing that, though Love cease,
Love’s race shows undecrease;
All find in dorp or dell
An Amabel.
—I felt that I could creep
To some housetop, and weep,
That Time the tyrant fell
Ruled Amabel!
I said (the while I sighed
That love like ours had died),
“Fond things I’ll no more tell
To Amabel,
“But leave her to her fate,
And fling across the gate,
‘Till the Last Trump, farewell,
O Amabel!’”
1865.
Hap
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
1866.
“In Vision I Roamed”
TO —
In vision I roamed the flashing Firmament,
So fierce in blazon that the Night waxed wan,
As though with an awed sense of such ostent;
And as I thought my spirit ranged on and on
In footless traverse through ghast heights of sky,
To the last chambers of the monstrous Dome,
Where stars the brightest here to darkness die:
Then, any spot on our own Earth seemed Home!
And the sick grief that you were far away
Grew pleasant thankfulness that you were near?
Who might have been, set on some outstep sphere,
Less than a Want to me, as day by day
I lived unware, uncaring all that lay
Locked in that Universe taciturn and drear.
1866.
At a Bridal
TO —
When you paced forth, to wait maternity,
A dream of other offspring held my mind,
Compounded of us twain as Love designed;
Rare forms, that corporate now will never be!
Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode’s decree,
And each thus found apart, of false desire,
A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire
As had fired ours could ever have mingled we;
And, grieved that lives so matched should mis-compose,
Each mourn the double waste; and question dare
To the Great Dame whence incarnation flows.
Why those high-purposed children never were:
What will she answer? That she does not care
If the race all such sovereign types unknows.
1866.
Postponement
Snow-bound in woodland, a mournful word,
Dropt now and then from the bill of a bird,
Reached me on wind-wafts; and thus I heard,
Wearily waiting:—
“I planned her a nest in a leafless tree,
But the passers eyed and twitted me,
And said: ‘How reckless a bird is he,
Cheerily mating!’
“Fear-filled, I stayed me till summer-tide,
In lewth of leaves to throne her bride;
But alas! her love for me waned and died,
