The noisy day is deafened by a crowd 2 “LOVE, DEAREST LADY, SUCH AS I WOULD SPEAK" IX LOVE, dearest Lady, such as I would speak, Whose health is of no hue-to feel decay With cheeks' decay, that have a rosy prime. Love is its own great loveliness alway, And takes new lustre from the touch of time; Its bough owns no December and no May, But bears its blossom into Winter's clime. Thomas Hood. 1827. SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE I I THOUGHT Once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wishedfor years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,— "Guess now who holds thee? -" Death," I said. But, there, The silver answer rang,-" Not Death, III UNLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart! Our ministering two angels look surprise Of chief musician. What hast thou to do With looking from the lattice-lights at me, A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? The chrism is on thine head,-on mine, the dew, And Death must dig the level where these agree. VI Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Of individual life, I shall command Without the sense of that which I forboreThy 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. XIV IF thou must love me, let it be for nought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day may Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for dry, A creature might forget to weep, who bore XVIII I NEVER gave a lock of hair away To a man, Dearest, except this to thee, Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully, I ring out to the full brown length and say "Take it." My day of youth went yesterday; My hair no longer bounds to my foot's glee, Nor plant I it from rose or myrtle-tree, As girls do, any more: it only may Now shade on two pale cheeks the mark of tears, Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside Through sorrow's trick. I thought the funeralshears Would take this first, but Love is justified,— Take it thou,--finding pure, from all those years, The kiss my mother left here when she died. XXII WHEN our two souls stand up erect and strong, |