I

Lord Houghton

THE BROOKSIDE

WANDERED by the brookside,
I wandered by the mill;

I could not hear the brook flow,
The noisy wheel was still;

There was no burr of grasshopper,
No chirp of any bird,

But the beating of my own heart
Was all the sound I heard.

I sat beneath the elm-tree;
I watched the long, long shade,
And, as it grew still longer,
I did not feel afraid;
For I listened for a footfall,

I listened for a word,

But the beating of my own heart

Was all the sound I heard.

He came not,

no, he came not,

The night came on alone,

The little stars sat, one by one,

Each on his golden throne;

The evening wind passed by my cheek,

The leaves above were stirred,

But the beating of my own heart
Was all the sound I heard.

Fast silent tears were flowing,
When something stood behind;
A hand was on my shoulder, -
I knew its touch was kind:
It drew me nearer,

nearer,

We did not speak one word,

For the beating of our own hearts

Was all the sound we heard.

Mrs. Browning

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

'HAT was he doing, the great god Pan,

WHAT

Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short did the great god Pan. (How tall it stood in the river!)

Then he drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sat by the river.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan, (Laughed while he sat by the river,)

"The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed." Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

SONNET VI

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand

Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore

Alone upon the threshold of my door

Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,

Without the sense of that which I forbore,

Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, he hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.