"Here again, here, here, here, happy year!"
O warble unchidden, unbidden!
Summer is coming, is coming, my dear,

And all the winters are hidden.

1889.

16

Lord Tennyson.

PHILOMELA

HARK! ah, the nightingale

The tawny-throated!

Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark!-what pain!

O wanderer from a Grecian shore,
Still, after many years, in distant lands,
Still nourishing in thy bewilder'd brain
That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-
world pain-

Say, will it never heal?

And can this fragrant lawn

With its cool trees, and night,

And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the dew,
To thy rack'd heart and brain
Afford no balm?

Dost thou to-night behold,

Here, through the moonlight on this

English grass,

15

Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?
Dost thou again peruse

With hot cheeks and sear'd eyes

The too clear web, and thy dumb sister's

shame?

Dost thou once more assay

Thy flight, and feel come over thee,

Poor fugitive, the feathery change

Once more, and once more seem to make
resound

With love and hate, triumph and agony,

Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?
Listen, Eugenia-

How thick the bursts come crowding

through the leaves!

Again-thou hearest?
Eternal passion!

Eternal pain!

1853.

32

Matthew Arnold.

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD

Oн, to be in England

Now that April 's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood

sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England-now!

8

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops-at the bent spray's edge

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary
dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-

flower!

1845.

20

Robert Browning.

MY STAR

ALL that I know

Of a certain star

Is, it can throw

(Like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red,

Now a dart of blue;

Till my friends have said

They would fain see, too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue!

The World-Soul

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs

furled:

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.

What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

THANKS to the morning light,
Thanks to the seething sea,

To the uplands of New Hampshire,
To the green-haired forest free;

ΤΟ

Thanks to each man of courage,
To the maids of holy mind;

To the boy with his games undaunted,
Who never looks behind.

Cities of proud hotels,
Houses of rich and great,
Vice nestles in your chambers,
Beneath your roofs of slate.
It cannot conquer folly,
Time-and-space-conquering steam,-
And the light-outspeeding telegraph
Bears nothing on its beam.

The politics are base,

The letters do not cheer,

And 't is far in the deeps of history-
The voice that speaketh clear.
Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.

Yet there in the parlor sits
Some figure of noble guise,-
Our angel in a stranger's form,
Or woman's pleading eyes;
Or only a flashing sunbeam
In at the window pane;
Or music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.