English

At the country inn, thousands of peach trees
are heavy with blossoms:
the best spring scenes are west of the painted bridge.
The hermit has been inspired to search for flowers:
as he sits on horseback, his poem is finished—
but he has lost his way!

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,--

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Othou that often hast within thine eyes
A Love who holds three shafts,—know thou from me
That this my sonnet would commend to thee
(Come from afar) a soul in heavy sighs,
Which even by Love's sharp arrow wounded lies.
Twice did the Syrian archer shoot, and he
Now bends his bow the third time, cunningly,
That, thou being here, he wound me in no wise.
Because the soul would quicken at the core
Thereby, which now is near to utter death,
From those two shafts, a triple wound that yield.
The first gives pleasure, yet disquieteth;

In our Museum galleries
To-day I lingered o'er the prize
Dead Greece vouchsafes to living eyes,—
Her Art for ever in fresh wise
From hour to hour rejoicing me.
Sighing I turned at last to win
Once more the London dirt and din;
And as I made the swing-door spin
And issued, they were hoisting in
A wingèd beast from Nineveh.

A human face the creature wore,
And hoofs behind and hoofs before,
And flanks with dark runes fretted o'er.
'Twas bull, 'twas mitred Minotaur,
A dead disbowelled mystery;

Iam all bent to glean the golden ore
Little by little from the river-bed;
Hoping the day to see
When Crœsus shall be conquered in my store.
Therefore, still sifting where the sands are spread,
I labour patiently:
Till, thus intent on this thing and no more,—
If to a vein of silver I were led,
It scarce could gladden me.
And, seeing that no joy's so warm i' the core
As this whereby the heart is comforted
And the desire set free,—
Therefore thy bitter love is still my scope,
Lady, from whom it is my life's sore theme

Nero , thus much for tidings in thine ear.
They of the Buondelmonti quake with dread,
Nor by all Florence may be comforted,
Noting in thee the lion's ravenous cheer;
Who more than any dragon giv'st them fear,
In ancient evil stubbornly array'd;
Neither by bridge nor bulwark to be stay'd,
But only by King Pharaoh's sepulchre.
Oh, in what monstrous sin dost thou engage,—
All these which are of loftiest blood to drive
Away, that none dare pause but all take wing!
Yet sooth it is, thou might'st redeem the pledge

Whoso abandons peace for war-seeking,
'Tis of all reason he should bear the smart.
Whoso hath evil speech, his medicine
Is silence, lest it seem a hateful art.
To vex the wasps' nest is not a wise thing;
Yet who rebukes his neighbour in good part,
A hundred years shall show his right therein.
Too prone to fear, one wrongs another's heart.
If ye but knew what may be known to me,
Ye would fall sorry sick, nor be thus bold
To cry among your fellows your ill thought.
Wherefore I would that every one of ye

As late at a house I made my call,
A mother and daughter's voices rang,
In twotreble songs, they sweetly sang,
Strain upon strain, and fall by fall.

The mother was comely, still, but staid,
The daughter was young, but womantall,
As people come on, to great from small,
Maid upon child, and wife from maid.

And oh! where the mother, in the train
Of years, may have left her child alone,
With no fellow voice to match her own,
Song upon song, and strain by strain,

May Providence show the way to bring

Where hast thou floated? in what seas pursued
Thy pastime? When wast thou an egg new spawned,
Lost in the immensity of ocean's waste?
Roar as they might, the overbearing winds
That rocked the deep, thy cradle, thou wast safe--
And in thy minnikin and embryo state,
Attached to the firm leaf of some salt weed,
Didst outlive tempests, such as wrung and racked
The joints of many a stout and gallant bark,
And whelmed them in the unexplored abyss.
Indebted to no magnet and no chart,
Nor under guidance of the polar fire,

Hence my epistle—skim the deep—fly o'er
Yon smooth expanse to the Teutonic shore!
Haste—lest a friend should grieve for thy delay—
And the Gods grant, that nothing thwart thy way!
I will myself invoke the king, who binds,
In his Sicanian echoing vault, the winds,
With Doris and her nymphs, and all the throng
Of azure gods, to speed thee safe along.
But rather, to insure thy happier haste,
Ascend Medea's chariot, if thou may'st;
Or that, whence young Triptolemus of yore
Descended, welcome on the Scythian shore.