Home-Thoughts, from Abroad The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild? 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 With love and hate, triumph and agony, Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale? How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again-thou hearest? Eternal pain! 1853. 32 Matthew Arnold. HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD Он, 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 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, To the uplands of New Hampshire, 10 8 16 Thanks to each man of courage, To the boy with his games undaunted, Cities of proud hotels, The politics are base, The letters do not cheer, And 't is far in the deeps of history- We plot and corrupt each other, Yet there in the parlor sits Its beautiful disdain. 24 32 The World-Soul The inevitable morning Finds them who in cellars be, And be sure the all-loving Nature Yon ridge of purple landscape, Alas! the sprite that haunts us It whispers of the glorious gods, If but one hero knew it, The sage, till he hit the secret, And henceforth we are comforted,— We are but such as they. Still, still the secret presses, The nearing clouds draw down, The crimson morning flames into 56 |