Birds here make song, each bird has his, 5 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
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!
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,

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15

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

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.
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.

Yet here is peace for ever new!
When I who watch them am away,
Still all things in this glade go through
The changes of their quiet day,

Then to their happy rest they pass!
The flowers upclose, the birds are fed,
The night comes down upon the grass,
The child sleeps warmly in his bed.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give!

And stop before the stone, and say

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Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.

1 Rossetti wrote this poem in his nineteenth year, or in 1847. W. M. Rossetti remarks that The Blessed Damozel "ranks as highly remarkable among the works of juvenile writers," especially when its "total unlikeness to any other poem then extant is taken into account.' It was published in the second number of The Germ, 1850; it appeared next in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856, and finally in the Poems of 1870.

* i. e. one of the blest in paradise.

"We two," she said, "will seek the groves Where the lady Mary is,

With her five handmaidens, whose names 105 Are five sweet symphonies,

Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,

Margaret and Rosalys.

This may have been suggested by the Tree of Life (Gen. ii., 9), or by the tree Yggdrasil of the Scandinavian mythology, the tree of existence, which bound together heaven, earth, and hell. In the latter case, it may have been intended to symbolize the mystic union of spiritual existence, as Rossetti represents every leaf, or utmost part, responding in praise to the influence of the Divine Spirit. In Rossetti's picture founded on this poem, "a glimpse is caught (above the figure of the Blessed Damosel) of the groves of paradise, wherein, beneath the shade of the spreading branches of a vast tree, the newly-met lovers embrace and rejoice with each other, on separation over and union made perfect at last." V. Sharp's Rossetti, p. 251.

Consider the sea's listless chime:
Time's self it is, made audible-
The murmur of the earth's own shell.
Secret continuance sublime

Is the sea's end: our sight may pass No furlong further. Since time was, This sound hath told the lapse of time.

No quiet, which is death's,-it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life,
Enduring always at dull strife.
As the world's heart of rest and wrath,
Its painful pulse is in the sands.
Last utterly, the whole sky stands,
Gray and not known, along its path.

Listen alone beside the sea,

Listen alone among the woods;
Those voices of twin solitudes

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SILENT NOON

(From, The House of Life, in Ballads and Sonnets, 1881)

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

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Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn

hedge.

X

William Morris

1834-1896

AN APOLOGY

THE SON OF CROESUS
(From the same)
ARGUMENT

Croesus, King of Lydia, dreamed that he saw his son slain by an iron weapon, and though by every means he strove to avert this doom from him, yet thus it happened, for his son was slain by the hand of the man who seemed least of all likely to do the deed.

Of Croesus tells my tale, a king of old
In Lydia, ere the Mede fell on the land,
A man made mighty by great heaps of gold,
Feared for the myriads strong of heart and hand
That 'neath his banners wrought out his com-
mand,

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And though his latter ending happened on ill, Yet first of every joy he had his fill.

Two sons he had, and one was dumb from
birth;

The other one, that Atys had to name,
Grew up a fair youth, and of might and worth,10
And well it seemed the race wherefrom he came
From him should never get reproach or shame:
But yet no stroke he struck before his death,
In no war-shout he spent his latest breath.

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Now Croesus, lying on his bed anight, Dreamed that he saw his dear son laid a-low, And folk lamenting he was slain outright, And that some iron thing had dealt the blow; By whose hand guided he could nowise know, Or if in peace by traitors it were done, Or in some open war not yet begun.

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Three times one night this vision broke his sleep,

So that at last he rose up from his bed,
That he might ponder how best he might keep
The threatened danger from so dear a head; 25
And, since he now was old enough to wed,
The King sent men to search the lands around,
Until some matchless maiden should be found;

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That in her arms this Atys might forget The praise of men, and fame of history, Whereby full many a field has been made wet With blood of men, and many a deep green sea Been reddened therewithal, and yet shall be; That her sweet voice might drown the people's

praise,

Her eyes make bright the uneventful days.

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