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DEDICATION. TO WILFRID AND ALICE MEYNELL.

IF the rose in meek duty May dedicate humbly To her grower the beauty Wherewith she is comely; If the mine to the miner The jewels that pined in it, Earth to diviner The springs he divined in it; To the grapes the wine-pitcher Their juice that was crushed in it, Viol to its witcher The music lay hushed in it; If the lips may pay Gladness In laughters she wakened, And the heart to its sadness Weeping unslakened, If the hid and sealed coffer, Whose having not his is, To the loosers may proffer Their finding--here this is; Their lives if all livers To the Life of all living,-- To you, O dear givers! I give your own giving.

Love in Dian's Lap.

AS lovers, banished from their lady's face And hopeless of her grace, Fashion a ghostly sweetness in its place, Fondly adore Some stealth-won cast attire she wore, A kerchief or a glove: And at the lover's beck Into the glove there fleets the hand, Or at impetuous command Up from the kerchief floats the virgin neck: So I, in very lowlihead of love,-- Too shyly reverencing To let one thought's light footfall smooth Tread near the living, consecrated thing,-- Treasure me thy cast youth. This outworn vesture, tenantless of thee, Hath yet my knee, For that, with show and semblance fair Of the past Her Who once the beautiful, discarded raiment bare, It cheateth me. As gale to gale drifts breath Of blossoms' death, So dropping down the years from hour to hour This dead youth's scent is wafted me to-day: I sit, and from the fragrance dream the flower. So, then, she looked ; And so her front sunk down Heavy beneath the poet's iron crown: On her mouth museful sweet-- Did thought and sadness greet: Sighs In those mournful eyes So put on visibilities; As viewless ether turns, in deep on deep, to dyes. Thus, long ago, She kept her meditative paces slow Through maiden meads, with wav?d shadow and gleam Of locks half-lifted on the winds of dream, Till love up-caught her to his chariot's glow. Yet, voluntary, happier Proserpine! This drooping flower of youth thou lettest fall I, faring in the cockshut-light, astray, Find on my 'lated way, And stoop, and gather for memorial, And lay it on my bosom, and make it mine. To this, the all of love the stars allow me, I dedicate and vow me. I reach back through the days A trothed hand to the dead the last trump shall not raise. The water-wraith that cries From those eternal sorrows of thy pictured eyes Entwines and draws me down their soundless intricacies!

TOO wearily had we and song Been left to look and left to long, Yea, song and we to long and look, Since thine acquainted feet forsook The mountain where the Muses hymn For Sinai and the Seraphim. Now in both the mountains' shine Dress thy countenance, twice divine! From Moses and the Muses draw The Tables of thy double Law! His rod-born fount and Castaly Let the one rock bring forth for thee, Renewing so from either spring The songs which both thy countries sing: Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long, Thou should'st forget thy native song, And mar thy mortal melodies With broken stammer of the skies.

Ah! let the sweet birds of the Lord With earth's waters make accord; Teach how the crucifix may be Carven from the laurel-tree, Fruit of the Hesperides Burnish take on Eden-trees, The Muses' sacred grove be wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In white Cecilia's lap of snows!

Thy childhood must have felt the stings Of too divine o'ershadowings; Its odorous heart have been a blossom That in darkness did unbosom, Those fire-flies of God to invite, Burning spirits, which by night Bear upon their laden wing To such hearts impregnating. For flowers that night-wings fertilize Mock down the stars' unsteady eyes, And with a happy, sleepless glance Gaze the moon out of countenance. I think thy girlhood's watchers must Have took thy folded songs on trust, And felt them, as one feels the stir Of still lightnings in the hair, When conscious hush expects the cloud To speak the golden secret loud Which tacit air is privy to; Flasked in the grape the wine they knew, Ere thy poet-mouth was able For its first young starry babble. Keep'st thou not yet that subtle grace? Yea, in this silent interspace, God sets His poems in thy face!

HER soul from earth to Heaven lies, Like the ladder of the vision, Whereon go To and fro, In ascension and demission, Star-flecked feet of Paradise.

Now she is drawn up from me, All my angels, wet-eyed, tristful, Gaze from great Heaven's gate Like pent children, very wistful, That below a playmate see.

Dream-dispensing face of hers! Ivory port which loosed upon me Wings, I wist, Whose amethyst Trepidations have forgone me,-- Hesper's filmy traffickers!

THOU dost to rich attire a grace, To let it deck itself with thee, And teachest pomp strange cunning ways To be thought simplicity. But lilies, stolen from grassy mold, No more curl?d state unfold Translated to a vase of gold; In burning throne though they keep still Serenities unthawed and chill. Therefore, albeit thou'rt stately so, In statelier state thou us'dst to go.

Though jewels should phosphoric burn Through those night-waters of thine hair, A flower from its translucid urn Poured silver flame more lunar-fair. These futile trappings but recall Degenerate worshippers who fall In purfled kirtle and brocade To 'parel the white Mother-Maid. For, as her image stood arrayed In vests of its self-substance wrought

To measure of the sculptor's thought-- Slurred by those added braveries; So for thy spirit did devise Its Maker seemly garniture, Of its own essence parcel pure,-- From grave simplicities a dress, And reticent demurenesses, And love encinctured with reserve; Which the woven vesture should subserve. For outward robes in their ostents Should show the soul's habiliments. Therefore I say,--Thou'rt fair even so, But better Fair I use to know.

The violet would thy dusk hair deck With graces like thine own unsought. Ah! but such place would daze and wreck Its simple, lowly rustic thought. For so advanc?d, dear, to thee, It would unlearn humility! Yet do not, with an altered look, In these weak numbers read rebuke; Which are but jealous lest too much God's master-piece thou shouldst retouch. Where a sweetness is complete, Add not sweets unto the sweet! Or, as thou wilt, for others so In unfamiliar richness go; But keep for mine acquainted eyes The fashions of thy Paradise.

OH, but the heavenly grammar did I hold Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold! So should her deathless beauty take no wrong, Praised in her own great kindred's fit and cognate tongue. Or if that language yet with us abode. Which Adam in the garden talked with God! But our untempered speech descends--poor heirs! Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's bricklayers: Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, Strong but to damn, not memorise, a spirit! A cheek, a lip, a limb, a bosom, they Move with light ease in speech of working-day; And women we do use to praise even so. But here the gates we burst, and to the temple go. Their praise were her dispraise; who dare, who dare, Adulate the seraphim for their burning hair? How, if with them I dared, here should I dare it? How praise the woman, who but know the spirit? How praise the colour of her eyes, uncaught While they were coloured with her varying thought How her mouth's shape, who only use to know What tender shape her speech will fit it to? Or her lips' redness, when their join?d veil Song's fervid hand has parted till it wore them pale?

What of the dear administress then may I utter, though I spoke her own carved perfect way? What of her daily gracious converse known, Whose heavenly despotism must needs dethrone And subjugate all sweetness but its own? Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word, And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird. What of her silence, that outsweetens speech? What of her thoughts, high marks for mine own thoughts to reach? Yet , Most gladly will she teach, and gladly learn; And teaching her, by her enchanting art, The master threefold learns for all he can impart. Now all is said, and all being said,--aye me! There yet remains unsaid the very She. Nay, to conclude , If of her virtues you evade the snare, Then for her faults you'll fall in love with her.

Alas, and I have spoken of her Muse-- Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews! Learn, the wise cherubim from harps of gold Seduce a trepidating music manifold; But the superior seraphim do know None other music but to flame and glow. So she first lighted on our frosty earth, A sad musician, of cherubic birth, Playing to alien ears--which did not prize The uncomprehended music of the skies-- The exiled airs of her far Paradise. But soon from her own harpings taking fire, In love and light her melodies expire. Now Heaven affords her, for her silenced hymn, A double portion of the seraphim.

At the rich odours from her heart that rise, My soul remembers its lost Paradise, And antenatal gales blow from Heaven's shores of spice; I grow essential all, uncloaking me From this encumbering virility, And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry: And parting from her, in me linger on Vague snatches of Uranian antiphon.

How to the petty prison could she shrink Of femineity?--Nay, but I think In a dear courtesy her spirit would Woman assume, for grace to womanhood. Or, votaress to the virgin Sanctitude Of reticent withdrawal's sweet, courted pale, She took the cloistral flesh, the sexual veil, Of her sad, aboriginal sisterhood; The habit of cloistral flesh which founding Eve indued.

Yet I have felt what terrors may consort In women's cheeks, the Graces' soft resort; My hand hath shook at gentle hands' access, And trembled at the waving of a tress; My blood known panic fear, and fled dismayed, Where ladies' eyes have set their ambuscade. The rustle of a robe hath been to me The very rattle of love's musketry; Although my heart hath beat the loud advance, I have recoiled before a challenging glance, Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance. And from it all, this knowledge have I got,-- The whole that others have, is less than they have not; All which makes other women noted fair, Unnoted would remain and overshone in her.

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole, Who cannot see her countenance for her soul; As birds see not the casement for the sky? And as 'tis check they prove its presence by, I know not of her body till I find My flight debarred the heaven of her mind. Hers is the face whence all should copied be, Did God make replicas of such as she; Its presence felt by what it does abate, Because the soul shines through tempered and mitigate: Where--as a figure labouring at night Beside the body of a splendid light-- Dark Time works hidden by its luminousness; And every line he labours to impress Turns added beauty, like the veins that run Athwart a leaf which hangs against the sun.

There regent Melancholy wide controls; There Earth- and Heaven-Love play for aureoles; There Sweetness out of Sadness breaks at fits, Like bubbles on dark water, or as flits A sudden silver fin through its deep infinites; There amorous Thought has sucked pale Fancy's breath, And Tenderness sits looking toward the lands of death There Feeling stills her breathing with her hand, And Dream from Melancholy part wrests the wand And on this lady's heart, looked you so deep, Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep: Upon the heavy blossom of her lips Hangs the bee Musing; nigh her lids eclipse Each half-occulted star beneath that lies; And in the contemplation of those eyes, Passionless passion, wild tranquillities.

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