English

It may be that the future holds for France
In spite of gloom and languor and decay
The golden glory of a dawn of day,
An untouched fair superb inheritance.
It may be that her restless eyes shall glance
On flowers immortal, when in bloomless grey
Regions our English yearnings fade away
While death's cold waves inexorably advance.

If this be so, the truth is plain to see.
Through errors deadly, sins of lying and lust,
France, proudly faithful to a mighty trust,
Has held that God and beauty of form are one.

ENGLAND AND ART

Be true to Art and Beauty. Milton's creed,
Coldly sublime, grasps not with equal span
The whole of Nature, or the whole of man:
Not by such dreams now prosper or succeed
Nations, whose souls and dawning spirits need
Food other than pale legends Puritan.
Through warmer veins the English red blood ran
When Shakespeare's fire linked thought to ardent deed.

Of all sweet names that sing in poets' ears
I think thy name is sweetest. Soft and new
It brought before me the broad Southern blue:
My dreams were sweetened by thy girlish years,
And hand in hand with all thy joys and fears
I wandered thine enchanted uplands through,
And saw the sunlight gild the wild " karroo, "
And saw thy lonely sweet eyes fill with tears.

I love the name, — the very sweetest name
It is that heart of poet ever sung.
I love to hear it linger on my tongue

Pale time is nought. Through era on era pass
Our souls in forms enduring for awhile,
Wherein we laugh and weep, and groan and smile,
And struggle fresh experience to amass.
But this time ... ah! this fateful time, alas,
We should have conquered hate and wrath and guile,
And risen for ever upward. From the Nile
Or Tiber's reeds to Thames' bright flowers and grass
Through life on life we have moved, — but now to-day,
God help me, dark foes bar us on our way,
Foes we have vanquished in the ages dead.

Of all sweet lovely things God ever made
I think the purest sweetest loveliest thing
Was moulded when he let thought's sombre wing
Touch woman's sunlit brow with genius' shade.
It was a great thought when God, unafraid,
First gave to woman passionate arms to cling: —
But when God gave her fiery heart to sing
A greater thought the Master's will obeyed.

There is no greater thought of God than this:
That woman in her spirit should combine
Love and sweet genius, — that her hand should twine

It smote across me with a sudden pang,
The thought that you must die. It shall not be!
If there is soul of passion in the sea
Or in the moon whose white orb used to hang
Above the wild plains where thy spirit sang
Its girlish love-song to infinity, —
If there was love in sun or flower or tree
Or river whose soft voice beside thee rang, —
If there is love in the Unknown Power or me, —

We have lived before, and met in ancient days,
Plucked golden flowers beneath strange Eastern light
And watched strange stars resplendent through the night
In epochs past remembrance. In thy gaze
Old magic lingers, and a dream of ways
Wherein wild swords once clashed in desperate fight:
Footsteps have followed us—hate still would smite,
And foemen's armour glitters through time's haze.

O love, my wife, my darling, have we won
So much to lose at length the sweet reward?
Are those alive to-day whose forms abhorred,

At last against the conquerors of the world
Nature took arms and fought. The circling storm
Was deadlier than the mêlee fierce and warm;
And snow-shafts than fire-bolts against them hurled.
Some sank beneath the drift and some slept curled
In hollows, till the white cloud hid each form;
Some staggered wildly onward arm in arm,
With the tricoloured standards dank and furled.

Napoleon gazed around, — and where were they,
The helmets and great epaulettes of red,
Whose sheen and flame through many a bloody day

If God be dead, and Man be left alone,
And no immortal golden towers be fair,
And nothing sweeter than earth's summer air
Can ever by our yearning hearts be known; —
If every altar now be overthrown,
And the last mistiest hill-tops searched and bare
Of Deity, — if Man's most urgent prayer
Is just a seed-tuft tossed about and blown: —

If this be so, yet let the lonely deep
Of awful blue interminable sky
Thrill to Man's kingly unbefriended cry:
Let Man the secret of his own heart keep

When many a type has vanished from the earth
The souls that fiction gives us still shall live,
Imperishable through seasons fugitive,
Regenerate yearly with a strange new birth.
Sweet spirits we loved, pure lips that rang with mirth,
Faces with Beauty's priceless gifts to give, —
These shall man's homage through all time receive,
Tribute to theirs, and their creators' worth.

Brightest of all, I sometimes think, two faces
Will shine upon the future like twin stars,
Full of all gifts of laughter and joy for man: