Falls on and urges you,
Mightily, tenderly,

Forth, as you clutch at it,
Forth to the infinite

Peace of the Grave.

October 1891

XIX

I. M.

R. L. S.

(1850-1894)

O, TIME and Change, they range and range
From sunshine round to thunder!—

They glance and go as the great winds blow,
And the best of our dreams drive under :
For Time and Change estrange, estrange-
And, now they have looked and seen us,
O, we that were dear, we are all-too near
With the thick of the world between us.

O, Death and Time, they chime and chime
Like bells at sunset falling!-
They end the song, they right the wrong,
They set the old echoes calling:

For Death and Time bring on the prime
Of God's own chosen weather,

And we lie in the peace of the Great Release
As once in the grass together.

February 1891

XX

THE shadow of Dawn;

Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams

Of Life and Death and Sleep;

Heard over gleaming flats, the old, unchanging sound

Of the old, unchanging Sea.

My soul and yours—

O, hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts,

Into the ghostliness,

The infinite and abounding solitudes,

Beyond-O, beyond !-beyond.

Here in the porch

Upon the multitudinous silences
Of the kingdoms of the grave,

We twain are you and I-two ghosts Omnipotence

XXI

WHEN the wind storms by with a shout, and the

stern sea-caves

Rejoice in the tramp and the roar of onsetting

waves,

Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life

Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife

Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before,

When the rain-rot spreads, and a tame sea mumbles the shore,

Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no

wrong,

Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your

sire's old song

O, you envy the blesséd dead that can live no more!

XXII

TREES and the menace of night;
Then a long, lonely, leaden mere
Backed by a desolate fell,

As by a spectral battlement; and then,
Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,
A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky,
So beggared, so incredibly bereft

Of starlight and the song of racing worlds,
It might have bellied down upon the Void
Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.

Hist! In the trees fulfilled of night
(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)
Is it the hurry of the rain?

Or the noise of a drive of the Dead,
Streaming before the irresistible Will