How should we grow in other ground?
How can we flower in foreign air?

-Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease; 210 And leave our desert to its peace!"

GEIST'S GRAVE

(January, 1881)

Four years!-and didst thou stay above
The ground, which hides thee now, but four?
And all that life, and all that love,
Were crowded, Geist! into no more?

5 Only four years those winning ways,
Which make me for thy presence yearn,
Call'd us to pet thee or to praise,
Dear little friend! at every turn?

That loving heart, that patient soul,

10 Had they indeed no longer span,

To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?

That liquid, melancholy eye,

From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs 15 Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things—

That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled
By spirits gloriously gay,

And temper of heroic mould

20 What, was four years their whole short day?

Yes, only four!-and not the course
Of all the centuries yet to come,
And not the infinite resource

Of nature, with her countless sum

25 Of figures, with her fulness vast
Of new creation evermore,
Can ever quite repeat the past,
Or just thy little self restore.

Stern law of every mortal lot!

30 Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, And builds himself I know not what

Of second life I know not where.

But thou, when struck thine hour to go,
On us, who stood despondent by,

35 A meek last glance of love didst throw,
And humbly lay thee down to die.

Yet would we keep thee in our heart-
Would fix our favourite on the scene,
Nor let thee utterly depart

40 And be as if thou ne'er hadst been.

And so there rise these lines of verse
On lips that rarely form them now;
While to each other we rehearse:
Such ways, such arts, such looks hadst thou!

45 We stroke thy broad brown paws again,
We bid thee to thy vacant chair,
We greet thee by the window-pane,
We hear thy scuffle on the stair;

We see the flaps of thy large ears
50 Quick raised to ask which way we go;
Crossing the frozen lake, appears
Thy small black figure on the snow!

Nor to us only art thou dear

Who mourn thee in thine English home; 55 Thou hast thine absent master's tear, Dropt by the far Australian foam.

Thy memory lasts both here and there,
And thou shalt live as long as we.
And after that-thou dost not care!
60 In us was all the world to thee.

Yet, fondly zealous for thy fame,
Even to a date beyond our own
We strive to carry down thy name,
By mounded turf, and graven stone.

65 We lay thee, close within our reach,
Here, where the grass is smooth and warm,
Between the holly and the beech,

Where oft we watch'd thy couchant form,

Asleep, yet lending half an ear

70 To travellers on the Portsmouth road;-
There choose we thee, O guardian dear,
Mark'd with a stone, thy last abode!

Then some, who through this garden pass,
When we too, like thyself, are clay,
75 Shall see thy grave upon the grass,
And stop before the stone, and say:

People who lived here long ago
Did by this stone, it seems, intend
To name for future times to know
80 The dachs-hound, Geist, their little friend.

DOVER BEACH

(From New Poems, 1867)

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 5 Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar

10 Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

15 Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Egean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

20 Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear

25 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

30 To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

35 And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night,

LINES WRITTEN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

(From Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, 1852)

In this lone, open glade I lie,

Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye,

Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand!

5 Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.

How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!

Sometimes a child will cross the glade
10 To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day's employ.

Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
15 What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.

Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod
Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out,
And, eased of basket and of rod,

20 Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout.

In the huge world, which roars hard by,
Be others happy if they can!

But in my helpless cradle I

Was breathed on by the rural Pan.

25 I on men's impious uproar hurl'd,
Think often, as I hear them rave,
That peace has left the upper world
And now keeps only in the grave,