What is love beyond the grave?
Is it memory or dust?
Is it spectral—is it brave?
Has it still an ought and must?

Is it fluid? Conscienceless?
Is it universal—pure?
Has it hands nor heart to bless?
Has it courage to endure?

Does it cherish—does it care?
Does it smile upon our pain?
Has it only wings and air
Where a weary head has lain?

I but vaguely have inferred—
Is it you and is it me?
Or are theme and phrasing blurred
In unrhymed obscurity?

And whence and why come you?

We know not whence, (was the answer,)
We only know that we drift here with the rest,
That we linger'd and lagg'd—but were wafted at last, and are now here,
To make the passing shower's concluding drops.

The peace of great doors be for you.
Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs.
Wait for the great hinges.

The peace of great churches be for you,
Where the players of loft pipe organs
Practice old lovely fragments, alone.

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

The peace of great prairies be for you.
Listen among windplayers in cornfields,
The wind learning over its oldest music.

The peace of great seas be for you.
Wait on a hook of land, a rock footing

Clear water on smooth rock
Could give no foot-hold for a single flower,
Or slenderest shaft of grain:
The stone must crumble under storm and rain—
The forests crash beneath the whirlwind's power—
And broken boughs from many a tempest-shock,
And fallen leaves of many a wintry hour,
Must mingle in the mould,

Before the harvest whitens on the plain,
Bearing an hundred-fold.
Patience, O weary heart!
Let all thy sparkling hours depart,
And all thy hopes be withered with the frost,
And every effort tempest-tost—

So, when all life's green leaves

It is from Nectan's mossy steep,
The foamy waters flash and leap:
It is where shrinking wild-flowers grow,
They lave the nymph that dwells below.

But wherefore in this far-off dell,
The reliques of a human cell?
Where the sad stream and lonely wind
Bring man no tidings of his kind.

‘Long years agone,’ the old man said,
'Twas told him by his grandsire dead:
‘One day two ancient sisters came:
None there could tell their race or name;

‘Their speech was not in Cornish phrase,
Their garb had signs of loftier days;

The royal MAB, dethroned, discrowned
By fairy rebels wild,
Has found a home on English ground,
And lives an English child.
I know it, Maiden, when I see
A fairy-tale upon your knee—
And note the page that idly lingers
Beneath those still and listless fingers—
And mark those dreamy looks that stray
To some bright vision far away,
Still seeking, in the pictured story,
The memory of a vanished glory.

There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear;
But we believe it was for us,
He hung and suffered there.

He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by his precious blood.

There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin,
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven, and let us in.

O dearly, dearly has he loved,

False glozing pleasures, casks of happiness,
Foolish night-fires, women's and children's wishes,
Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,
Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes;
These are the pleasures here.

True earnest sorrows, rooted miseries,
Anguish in grain, vexations ripe and blown,
Sure-footed griefs, solid calamities,
Plain demonstrations, evident and clear,
Fetching their proofs ev'n from the very bone;
These are the sorrows here.

But O the folly of distracted men,

When the last, long shift will be laboured, and the lying time will be burst,
And we go as picks or shovels, navvies or nabobs, must,
When you go up on the scrap-heap and I go down to the dust,

Will ever a one remember the times our voices rung,
When you were limber and lissome, and I was lusty and young?
Remember the jobs we've laboured, the heartful songs we 've sung?

Perhaps some mortal in speaking will give us a kindly thought—
“There is a muck-pile they shifted, here is a place where they wrought.”

Why , what a history is on the rose!
A history beyond all other flowers;
But never more, in garden or in grove,
Will the white queen reign paramount again.
She must content her with remembered things,
When her pale leaves were badge for knight and earl;
Pledge of a loyalty which was as pure,
As free from stain, as those white depths her leaves
Unfolded to the earliest breath of June.