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SONNETS.

CLEAVE THOU THE WAVES.

• CLEAVE thou the waves that weltering to and fro
• Surge multitudinous. The eternal Powers
• Of sun, moon, stars, the air, the hurrying hours,
• The winged winds, the still dissolving show
• Of clouds in calm or storm, for ever flow
• Above thee; while the abysmal sea devours
• The untold dead insatiate, where it lowers
• O’er glooms unfathomed, limitless, below.

• No longer on the golden‐fretted sands,
• Where many a shallow tide abortive chafes,
• Mayst thou delay; life onward sweeping blends
• With far‐off heaven: the dauntless one who braves
• The perilous flood with calm unswerving hands,
• The elements sustain: cleave thou the waves.

MANCHESTER BY NIGHT.

• O’ER this huge town, rife with intestine wars,
• Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines
• Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines
• Black brows majestical with glimmering stars.
• Her dewy silence soothes life’s angry jars:
• And like a mother’s wan white face, who pines
• Above her children’s turbulent ways, so shines
• The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.

• Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush
• Each other in the fateful strife for breath
• And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush
• Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath,
• Are swathed within the universal hush,
• As life exchanges semblances with death.

TO THE OBELISK DURING THE GREAT FROST, 1881.

• THOU sign‐post of the Desert! Obelisk,
• Once fronting in thy monumental pride
• Egypt’s fierce sun, that blazing far and wide,
• Sheared her of tree and herb, till like a disk
• Her waste stretched shadowless, and fraught with risk
• To those who with their beasts of burden hied
• Across the seas of sand until they spied
• Thy pillar, and their flagging hearts grew brisk:

• Now reared beside our Thames so wintry gray,
• Where blocks of ice drift with the drifting stream,
• Thou risest o’er the alien prospect! Say,
• Yon dull, blear, rayless orb whose lurid gleam
• Tinges the snow‐draped ships and writhing steam,
• Is this the sun which fired thine orient day?

TO MEMORY.

• OH in this dearth and winter of the soul,
• When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing,
• Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing
• Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall—
• Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call
• On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring
• One leaf, one blossom from that far‐off spring
• When love‐s auroral light lay over all.

• Bring but one pansy: haply so the thrill
• Of poignant yearning for those glad dead years
• May, like the gutsy south, breathe o’er the chill
• Of frozen grief, dissolving it in tears,
• Till numb Hope, stirred by that warm dropping rain,
• Will deem, perchance, Love’s springtide come again.

DESPAIR.

• THY wings swoop darkening round my soul, Despair!
• And on my brain thy shadow seems to brood
• And hem me round with stifling solitude,
• With chasms of vacuous gloom which are thy lair.
• No light of human joy, no song or prayer,
• Breaks ever on this chaos, all imbrued
• With heart’s‐blood trickling from the multitude
• Of sweet hopes slain, or agonizing there.

• Lo, wilt thou yield thyself to grief, and roll
• Vanquished from thy high seat, imperial brain;
• And abdicating turbulent life’s control,
• Be dragged a captive bound in sorrow’s chain?
• Nay! though my heart is breaking with its pain,
• No pain on earth has power to crush my soul.

SLEEP.

• LOVE‐CRADLING Night, lit by the lucent moon,
• Most pitiful and mother‐hearted Night!
• Blest armistice in life’s tumultuous fight,
• Resolving discords to a spheral tune!
• When tired with heat and strenuous toil of noon,
• With ceaseless conflict betwixt might and right,
• With ebb and flow of sorrow and delight,
• Our panting hearts beneath their burdens swoon,

• To thee, O star‐eyed comforter, we creep,
• Earth’s ill‐used step‐children to thee make moan,
• As hiding in thy dark skirts’ ample sweep;
• —Poor debtors whose brief life is not their own;
• For dunned by Death, to whom we owe its loan,
• Give us, O Night, the interest paid in sleep.

HAUNTED STREETS.

• LO, haply walking in some clattering street—
• Where throngs of men and women dumbly pass,
• Like shifting pictures seen within a glass
• Which leave no trace behind—one seems to meet,
• In roads once trodden by our mutual feet,
• A face projected from that shadowy mass
• Of faces, quite familiar as it was,
• Which beaming on us stands out clear and sweet.

• The face of faces we again behold
• That lit our life when life was very fair,
• And leaps our heart toward eyes and mouth and hair:
• Oblivious of the undying love grown cold,
• Or body sheeted in the churchyard mould,
• We stretch out yearning hands and grasp—the air.

ΑΝΑΓΚΗ.

• LIKE a great rock which looming o’er the deep
• Casts his eternal shadow on the strands,
• And veiled in cloud inexorably stands,
• While vaulting round his adamantine steep
• Embattled breakers clamorously leap,
• Sun‐garlanded and hope‐uplifted bands,
• But soon with waters shattered in the sands
• Slowly recoiling back to ocean creep:

• So sternly dost thou tower above us, Fate!
• For still our eager hearts exultant beat,
• Borne in the hurrying tide of life elate,
• And dashing break against thy marble feet.
• But would Hope’s rainbow aureole round us fleet,
• Without these hurtling shocks of man’s estate?

THE DEAD.

• THE dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
• Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
• They have forged our chains of being for good or ill;
• And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
• Our perishable bodies are the mould
• In which their strong imperishable will—
• Mortality’s deep yearning to fulfil—
• Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.

• Vibrations infinite of life in death,
• As a star’s travelling light survives its star!
• So may we hold our lives, that when we are
• The fate of those who then will draw this breath,
• They shall not drag us to their judgment bar,
• And curse the heritage which we bequeath.

CHRISTMAS EVE.

• ALONE—with one fair star for company,
• The loveliest star among the hosts of night,
• While the grey tide ebbs with the ebbing light—
• I pace along the darkening wintry sea.
• Now round the yule‐log and the glittering tree
• Twinkling with festive tapers, eyes as bright
• Sparkle with Christmas joys and young delight,
• As each one gathers to his family.

• But I—a waif on earth where—er I roam—
• Uprooted with life’s bleeding hopes and fears
• From that one heart that was my heart’s sole home,
• Feel the old pang pierce through the severing years,
• And as I think upon the years to come
• That fair star trembles through my falling tears.

NEW YEAR’S EVE.

• ANOTHER full‐orbed year hath waned to‐day,
• And set in the irrevocable past,
• And headlong whirled along Time‐s winged blast
• My fluttering rose of youth is borne away:
• Ah rose once crimson with the blood of May,
• A honeyed haunt where bees would break their fast,
• I watch thy scattering petals flee aghast,
• And all the flickering rose‐lights turning grey.

• Poor fool of life! plagued ever with thy vain
• Regrets and futile longings! were the years
• Not cups o’erbrimming still with gall and tears?
• Let go thy puny personal joy and pain!
• If youth with all its brief hope disappears,
• To deathless hope we must be born again.