Sooner or later I too may passively take the print

Of the golden age-why not?

I have

Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.

IX.

Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,

When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like swine, When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie; Peace in her vineyard - yes! - but company forges the wine.

X.

the ruffian's head,

neither hope nor trust;

my face as a flint,

of the trampled wife,

And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread, And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life,

XI.

And Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villanous centre-bits Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,

While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits

To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights.

XII.

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,

And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,

Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea, War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

XIII.

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill, And the rushing battle-bolt sang from

the three-decker out of the foam, That the smooth-faced snubnosed rogue would leap from his counter and till, And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home.

XIV.

What am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood?

Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die

Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood

On a horror of shatter'd limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?

XV.

Would there be sorrow for me? there was love in the passionate shriek, Love for the silent thing that had made false haste to the grave

cast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been

For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of the rose,

Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose, From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.

III.

COLD and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek,

Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd,

Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek, Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound; Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong

Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound, Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more, But arose, and all by myself in my own

dark garden ground, Listening now to the tide in its broadflung shipwrecking roar, Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave, Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found

The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

IV.

I.

A MILLION emeralds break from the rubybudded lime

In the little grove where I sit - ah, wherefore cannot I be Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland,

breeze of a softer clime, Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,

others ever succeed?

Ah yet, we cannot be kind to each other here for an hour;

We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother's shame;

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

VI.

in the hubbub of lies; From the long-neck'd geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise Because their natures are little, and, whether he heed it or not, Where each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies.

X.