And their warm tears: but all hath suffered change;
For surely now our household hearths are cold:

Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange :
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes. over-bold

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten-years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile :
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labor unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars,

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

But, propped on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly,)

With half-dropped eyelids still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly

His waters from the purple hill

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave through the thick-twined vineTo watch the emerald-colored water falling

Through many a woven acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparking brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:

The Lotos blows by every winding creek:

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone;

Through every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown We have had enough of action, and of motion we,

Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seeth

ing free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the

sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fier

sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong:
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;

Till they perish and they suffer-some, 'tis whispered-down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

TO GARIBALDI.

TRUE thinker and true worker, hand in hand,
Unlike, but yet how like each bears his part;
Hero and poet with the same great heart.
In one the life-blood of the southern land

Pulses with sudden throb, as beat the waves
Where the blue sea his rocky islet laves;
The other, master of the mighty rhyme,
Had pierced the dusky mantle of past time,
And seen the shadows of the noble dead,
The knightly throng, with Arthur at their head,
Writing their Idyls in a deathless song:

Deeming, perchance, such life a dim ideal-
Its gentle strength, its fearless scorn of wrong-
On Garibaldi gazed, and found it real.

THE

CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE..

HALF a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

'Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade """ Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Some one had blundered:

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred,

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while

All the world wondered :

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right through the line they broke

Cossack and Russian,

Reeled from the sabre-stroke

Shattered and sundered,

Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.