So pass the years, and ever in the past
Old Nature smiles at us frail houseless things;
And if in love or in derision vast
Men scarcely know; alone thy memory brings
To me a hope that cannot fail: a calm
That spreads where else despair: for in thy soul
I see the mould of Nature’s mirrored whole—
One love, like thine, to shield mankind from harm.
BY THE MOUTH OF THE ARNO
Here, where the crawling river seaward sets,
And riverward the sea, about a land
Laid under heaven in lonely flats of sand
Saltblackened, where the sluggish water frets
Its margin till marsh-deltas interlace
In reedy desolation; on each hand
The long gray grasses shiver in their grace
Through sun and shadow, till salt winds deface,
Their wasted beauty; here—by such a strand—
Pale Shelley passed, and so his course did keep
To sail Death’s unexplored and open deep.
* * *
AS ROUND A LIGHTHOUSE
TO——
As round a lighthouse swept of sea and air
The waves plunge many fathom deep, and flow
Unresting o’er the rocky base below,
And glimmer shifting in the fitful glare;
So great unrest about thy heart doth go,
So deep a flood of turbulent despair.
Stand true, O tender heart and strong, stand true:
For I, who steer alone across the deep,
By thee, unknown of thee, my course must keep
O’er the foam-crested fields for ever new;
And thou, alone, unknowing, on the steep,
Must watch the waves with ruin all bestrew.
Not overnear to thee my course may run;
Yet pray I, somewhere on the bitter tide
Thy beam the shuddering night for me divide,
And show the heart-red splendour of thy sun
Reorient with delight upon the wide
Waters of gloomy death when life is done.