According as his humours lead,

A meaning suited to his mind. And liberal applications lie

In Art like Nature, dearest friend; So 'twere to cramp its use, if I

Should hook it to some useful end.

L'ENVOI.

I.

You shake your head. A random string
Your finer female sense offends.
Well-were it not a pleasant thing
To fall asleep with all one's friends;
To pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men;
And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars,

And wake on science grown to more, On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore; And all that else the years will show, The Poet-forms of stronger hours, The vast Republics that may grow, The Federations and the Powers; Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times.

II.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep

Thro' sunny decads new and strange, Or gay quinquenniads would we reap The flower and quintessence of change.

III.

Ah, yet would I — and would I might! So much your eyes my fancy takeBe still the first to leap to light

That I might kiss those eyes awake! For, am I right, or am I wrong,

To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song, And I will take my pleasure there: And, am I right or am I wrong,

My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song,

Perforce will still revert to you; Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curl'd,

And evermore a costly kiss

The prelude to some brighter world.

IV.

For since the time when Adam first Embraced his Eve in happy hour, And every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower, What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes,

What lips, like thine, so sweetly join'd?

Where on the double rosebud droops
The fullness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,

Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,

That lets thee neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
And in the rights that name may
give,

Are clasp'd the moral of thy life,
And that for which I care to live.

EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there, O whisper to your glass, and say, What wonder, if he thinks me fair?' What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise

That float thro' Heaven, and cannot
light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court
By Cupid-boys of blooming hue-
But take it earnest wed with sport,
And either sacred unto you.

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,
A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren:
Yet say the neighbours when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all

That grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great In days of old Amphion,

The linden broke her ranks and rent
The woodbine wreaths that bind her,
And down the middle, buzz! she went
With all her bees behind her:
The poplars, in long order due,
With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two
By rivers gallopaded.

Came wet-shod alder from the wave,
Came yews, a dismal coterie;
Each pluck'd his one foot from the
grave

Poussetting with a sloe-tree:

Old elms came breaking from the vine,
The vine stream'd out to follow,
And, sweating rosin, plump'd the pine
From many a cloudy hollow.

And wasn't it a sight to see,

When, ere his song was ended,
Like some great landslip, tree by tree,
The country-side descended;

And shepherds from the mountain-eaves Look'd down, half-pleased, half-frighten'd,

As dash'd about the drunken leaves

The random sunshine lighten'd!

Oh, nature first was fresh to men,
And wanton without measure;
So youthful and so flexile then,

You moved her at your pleasure.
Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs!
And make her dance attendance;
Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs,
And scirrhous roots and tendons.

'Tis vain! in such a brassy age

I could not move a thistle;
The very sparrows in the hedge
Scarce answer to my whistle;
Or at the most, when three-parts-sick
With strumming and with scraping,
A jackass heehaws from the rick,
The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound
Like sleepy counsel pleading;
O Lord!

-'tis in my neighbour's ground, The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises,

And Works on Gardening thro' there, And Methods of transplanting trees

To look as if they grew there.

The wither'd Misses! how they prose
O'er books of travell'd seamen,
And show you slips of all that grows
From England to Van Diemen.
They read in arbours clipt and cut,
And alleys, faded places,
By squares of tropic summer shut
And warm'd in crystal cases.

But these, tho' fed with careful dirt,
Are neither green nor sappy;
Half-conscious of the garden-squirt,
The spindlings look unhappy.
Better to me the meanest weed

That blows upon its mountain,
The vilest herb that runs to seed
Beside its native fountain.

And I must work thro' months of toil,
And years of cultivation,
Upon my proper patch of soil

To grow my own plantation.
I'll take the showers as they fall,
I will not vex my bosom :
Enough if at the end of all
A little garden blossom.