The true possession is the holy sense
Of love and of ecstatic victory.
Such true possession, love, was given to me:—
A glory of triumph tenderly intense.
A passion without envy or offence
Was mine,—and that clear passion's blest reward
Was the achievement of a golden sword
That severed all the barriers dark and dense.

One night when thou wast reading of my love,
My yearning drew thee,—and thy spirit came,
Like a white-winged and golden-crested dove,
With plumage touched by passion as by flame:

But surely, far beyond the eternal hills
And the slow river that pale men revere
More than earth's quiet violet-girdled rills,
Shall love and all things doubtful be made clear.
Earth's autumn, red and solemn and austere,
Shall blossom into green May-scented spring,
And the opening of a green eternal year
Arouse the happy praise of everything; —
Then shall the hills and heaven's copses ring
With notes of throstles that were broken-hearted,
And whistle of nightingales too weak to sing
When love and all love's music had departed;

LINES Written ON AGAIN R EADING AN OLD R OMANCE

O I SOLINA , loved in boyish fashion,
Loved when the heart was nobly pure and free,
Again I read thy tale of love and passion,
Again forget the world and gaze on thee.

Romance beyond romance is in thy story:
I read the wild tale thirty years ago —
Yet still I see the sunlight's ceaseless glory
Poured over plains and hills of Mexico.

Hold thou thy loved one through the summer night;
Soon 'twill be light;
The armies of the stars will own defeat:
The sun will frighten love from out the skies,
With flaming eyes:
But yet the night was sweet!

The velvet lips that rested once on thine,
With touch divine,
Turn elsewhere. Will love pause, though tears entreat?
Through all time, never! — Yet in days gone by
(Yes, one swift sigh!)
Those lips to thee were sweet.

One hour of rapture, and the sun's warm breath;
Then sunless death;
Death for the poppies and the golden wheat:

What is the whisper of the leaves
Round ruined turrets reddening fast,
Or nestling under cottage-eaves
While autumn winds go sighing past?
“Life is sorrow,” they whisper,
“Life is only a dream:
The sky seemed blue, but it was not true;
The sky is as grey as the stream!”

What is the whisper of the heart
When love and life have ceased to please,
When passion's fairy dreams depart
And cold winds rustle through the trees?
“Life is trouble,” it whispers,
“Trouble and wild despair

The bloom is fair upon the hawthorn hedges;
The throstles sing from many a budding spray;
Blue ripples laugh along the river-edges;
The blue sky seems to whisper, " It is May! "
And yet the thought of tawny-leaved September
Dismays the fancy with a touch of gloom:
Aye, and a mem'ry of old wild November,
Whose storm-winds trumpet forth pale Autumn's doom.

When love is at its sweetest, in its season,
When it is full of summer joy and mirth,
There sometimes comes the thought, " In love is treason:
Not always Summer sways the green-robed earth. "

How few there are on whom their City fair
And sweet as Athens in the old days shines!
London I loved, — her houses smoke-veiled lines,
Her towers, her sunless stream, her fog-damp air,
The tiger-lily in a London square
To me meant all things. What the soul divines
Of mystery, thrilling through a thousand signs,
This is our own, — this, fearless, we declare.

London I loved, — each Park, and every tree
In each, the red-billed swans, the sparrows gay,
The teeming busy life of every day.
Not the blue wavelets of a summer ocean

Yet deeper is my passionate tenderness.
The nearer that thou art, the more thine eyes
Are ever to me, love, a sweet surprise;
Purer than fancy's is thy warm caress.
If at a distance I had cause to bless,
What shall I say now that God's bluest skies
Of cordial summer, deep with ecstasies,
Beam round me, freed for e'er from each distress?

Oh whiter than the soul of which I dreamed
Is this thine own soul, now its wealth has gleamed
Upon me, brought by God for ever close;
Sweeter the body of wonder I adored,

Take Marlowe's splendid and impassioned heart,
Full of divine Elizabethan fire:
Take Shelley's tenderness, and Shelley's lyre,
And touch dim heights wherethrough strange star-beams dart:
Take Hugo's sovereign love and sense of Art,
And Musset's sweet insatiable desire,
And Byron's wrath at king and priest and liar —
These diverse gifts to one swift soul impart: —
Then over and above these several powers
Add Christ's own changeless spirit of love for men;
Mix Shelley's love for stars and birds and flowers

The light of battle and the light that gleams
From woman's eyes — these are the rays divine
That on the passionate heart of manhood shine
And fill life's highways with tempestuous dreams.
The sweetest light of all is that which streams
Along the glistening bayonets' serried line
When, just now, under growth of rose or pine
Love lightened forth: — how close the memory seems!

Love in the heart, and the strong sword in hand:
The old Elizabethan bards loved so.
The heart of manhood has waxed faint and slow