The fever gone, with leaps of heart he sees her bending o'er him; Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore him!Thus woke the poet from the dream his life's long fever gave him, Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes, which closed in death to save him!

Thus? O, not thus! no type of earth can image that awaking,

Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him breaking,

Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted;

But felt those eyes alone, and knew "My Saviour! not deserted!"

Deserted! who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested

Upon the Victim's hidden face, no love was manifested?

What frantic hands outstretched have e'er the atoning drops averted, What tears have washed them from the soul, that one should be deserted?

Deserted! God could separate from his own essence rather:

And Adam's sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father; Yea, once, Immanuel's orphaned cry his universe hath shaken,

It went up single, echoless, "My God, I am forsaken!"

It went up from the Holy's lips amid his lost creation,

That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation;

That earth's worst frenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope's fruition, And I, on Cowper's grave, should see his rapture in a vision !

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE

THACKERAY.

[1811-1863.]

AT THE CHURCH GATE. ALTHOUGH I enter not, Yet round about the spot Ofttimes I hover;

ALFRED TENNYSON.

And near the sacred gate, With longing eyes I wait,

Expectant of her.

The minster bell tolls out
Above the city's rout,

And noise and humming;
They've hushed the minster bell:
The organ 'gins to swell;
She's coming, she's coming!

My lady comes at last, Timid and stepping fast,

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And hastening hither, With modest eyes downcast, She comes, -she's here, she's past, May Heaven go with her!

Kneel undisturbed, fair saint'
Pour out your praise or plaint,
Meekly and duly;

I will not enter there,
To sully your pure prayer
With thoughts unruly.

But suffer me to pace
Round the forbidden place,
Lingering a minute
Like outcast spirits who wait
And see through heaven's gate
Angels within it.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

MARIANA.

WITH blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all,
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden-wall-
The broken sheds looked sad and strange,
Unlifted was the clinking latch,
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!”

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow; The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen's low Came to her without hope of change,

In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "The day is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
And I would that I were dead!"

She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound Her sense; but most she loathed the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower. Then, said she, "I am very dreary,

He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
O God, that I were dead!"

"BREAK, BREAK, BREAK!" BREAK, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

MEMORY.

I CLIMB the hill: from end to end
Of all the landscape underneath,
I find no place that does not breathe
Some gracious memory of my friend;

No gray old grange, or lonely fold,

Or low morass and whispering reed, Or simple stile from mead to mead, Or sheepwalk up the windy wold;

Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw

That hears the latest linnet trill, Nor quarry trenched along the hill, And haunted by the wrangling daw.

Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down;
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away;

Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air;

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser Wain
Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove;

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow,

And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger's child;

As year by year the laborer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.

DOUBT.

You say, but with no touch of scorn, Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes

Are tender over drowning flies, You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.

I know not: one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed, Who touched a jarring lyre at first, But ever strove to make it true:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,

At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

He fought his doubts and gathered strength,

He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own;

And Power was with him in the night,

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Which makes the darkness and the

light,

And dwells not in the light alone,

But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinai's peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Although the trumpet blew so loud.

THE LARGER HOPE.

O YET We trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall At last-far off-at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

THE wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature, then, at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares