APPY is England! I could be content

To see no other verdure than its own;

To feel no other breezes than are blown

Through its tall woods with high romances blent : Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment

For skies Italian, and an inward groan

To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,

And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,

Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:

Yet do I often warmly burn to see

Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,

And float with them about the summer waters.

TO SLEEP.

SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!

Shutting with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleased eyes, embowered from the

light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:

O soothest sleep! if so it please thee, close,

In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes, Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws,

Around my bed its lulling charities;

Then save me, or the passed day will shine

Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords

Its strength, for darkness burrowing like a mole;

Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,

And seal the hushëd casket of my soul.

KEATS'S LAST SONNET.

RIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou

art

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors.No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

L

LIBERTY.

AY, What is Freedom? What the right of souls
Which all who know are bound to keep, or die,

And who knows not, is dead? In vain ye pry

In musty archives, or retentive scrolls,

Charters and statutes, constitutions, rolls,

And remnants of the old world's history :

These show what has been, not what ought to be,

Or teach at best how wiser Time controls
Man's futile purposes. As vain the search

Of restless factions, who, in lawless will,
Fix the foundations of a creedless church-

A lawless rule-an anarchy of ill :

But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,

A universal license to be good.

MAY, 1840.

LOVELY morn, so still, so very still,
It hardly seems a growing day of Spring,

Though all the odorous buds are blossoming,
And the small matin birds were glad and shrill
Some hours ago; but now the woodland rill
Murmurs along, the only vocal thing,

Save when the wee wren flits with stealthy wing,

And cons by fits and bits her evening trill.
Lovers might sit on such a morn as this,

An hour together, looking at the sky,
Nor dare to break the silence with a kiss,

Long listening for the signal of a sigh ;

And the sweet Nun, diffused in voiceless prayer,
Feel her own soul through all the brooding air.