Like nightly watchers from a palace tower,
In hope and faith and patience strong to wait
The beacons on the hills, which should relate
How some fenced city of deceit and power
Had fallen—ye have stood for many an hour,
Till your first hope’s high movements must be dead,
And if with new ye have not cheered and fed
Your bosoms, dim despair may be your dower.
Yet not for all—tho’ yet no fire may crest
The mountains, or light up their beacons sere—
Your eminent commission so far wrong,
Or so much flatter the oppressors’ rest,
As to give o’er your watching, for so long
As ye shall hope, ’tis reason they must fear.
SONNET.
The moments that we rescue and redeem
From the bare desert and the waste of years,
To fertilize, it may be with our tears,
Yet so that for time after they shall teem
With better than rank weeds, and wear a gleam
Of visionary light, and on the wind
Fling odours from the fields long left behind,
These and their fruit to us can never seem
Indifferent things, and therefore do I look
Not without gentle sadness upon thee,
And liken thy outgoing, O my book,
To the impatience of a little brook,
Which might with flowers have lingered pleasantly,
Yet toils to perish in the mighty sea.
ON AN EARLY DEATH.
I.
Ah me! of them from whom the good have hope,
Of them whom virtue for her liegemen claims,
How many the world tames,
That with its evil they quite cease to cope,
And their first fealty sworn to beauty and truth
Break early; and amid their sinful youth
Make shipwreck of all high and glorious aims.
How few the fierce and fiery trial stand,
To be as weapons tempered and approved
For an almighty hand.
How few of all the streamlets that were moved,
Do ever unto clearness run again,
And therefore is it marvellous to us,
When of these weapons one is broken thus,
When of these fountains one would seem in vain
Renewed in clearness, and is staunched before
It has had leave to spread fresh streams the desert o’er.