Thy leaf has perish'd in the green, And, while we breathe beneath the sun,

The world which credits what is done Is cold to all that might have been.

So here shall silence guard thy fame;
But somewhere, out of human view,
Whate'er thy hands are set to do
Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

LXXVI.

Take wings of fancy, and ascend,

And in a moment set thy face Where all the starry heavens of space

Are sharpen'd to a needle's end;

Take wings of foresight; lighten thro'
The secular abyss to come,
And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb
Before the mouldering of a yew;

And if the matin songs, that woke

The darkness of our planet, last, Thine own shall wither in the vast, Ere half the lifetime of an oak.

Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers

With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain; And what are they when these remain

The ruin'd shells of hollow towers?

LXXVII.

What hope is here for modern rhyme

To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that
lie

Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?

These mortal lullabies of pain

May bind a book, may line a box, May serve to curl a maiden's locks; Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,

And, passing, turn the page that tells

A grief, then changed to something else,

Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that? My darken'd ways Shall ring with music all the same; To breathe my loss is more than fame,

To utter love more sweet than praise.

LXXVIII.

Again at Christmas did we weave

The holly round the Christmas hearth;

The silent snow possess'd the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas-eve: The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,

Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind. Who show'd a token of distress?

No single tear, no mark of pain: O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!

No mixt with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry.

LXXIX.

'More than my brothers are to me,' Let this not vex thee, noble heart! I know thee of what force thou art

To hold the costliest love in fee.

But thou and I are one in kind,

As moulded like in Nature's mint; And hill and wood and field did print

The same sweet forms in either mind.

For us the same cold streamlet curl'd Thro' all his eddying coves; the

same

All winds that roam the twilight

came

In whispers of the beauteous world.