II.

HOPE DEFERRED.

BRING no more flowers and books and precious things! O, speak no more of our beloved Art,

Of summer haunts, melodious wanderings

In leafy refuge from this weary mart:

Surely such thoughts were dear unto my heart;

Now every word a newer sadness brings!

Thus oft some forest-bird, caged far apart

From verdurous freedom, droops his careless wings,
Nor craves for more than food from day to day;
So long bereft of wildwood joy and song,
Hopeless of all he dared to hope so long,
The music born within him dies away :
Even the song he loved becomes a pain,
Full-freighted with a longing all in vain.

of these sonnets in all. Two of them are constructed according to the true Italian model. The other two end with rhyming couplets, and therefore have that epigrammatic termination which the Italian masters considered fatal to the beauty of the sonnet. Mr. Stedman is nevertheless a genuine sonneteer in spirit, if not always in form; and a little further study of the peculiar structure of this species of poem will place him in the front rank of sonnet-writers. Indeed, I shall not attempt to decide whether the sonnets hereafter quoted have not already won him that position.

III.

THE SWALLOW.

HAD I, my love declared, the tireless wing
That wafts the swallow to her northern skies,
I would not, sheer within the rich surprise
Of full-blown Summer, like the swallow, fling
My coyer being; but would follow Spring,
Melodious consort, as she daily flies,

Apace with suns that o'er new woodlands rise
Each morn
with rains her gentler stages bring.
My pinions should beat music with her own;
Her smiles and odors should delight me ever,
Gliding, with measured progress, from the zone
Where golden seas receive the mighty river,
Unto yon lichened cliffs, whose ridges sever
Our Norseland from the Arctic surge's moan.

IV.

TO B. T.

(With a copy of the Iliad.)

BAYARD, awaken not this music strong,

While round thy home the indolent sweet breeze
Floats lightly as the summer breath of seas
O'er which Ulysses heard the Sirens' song!
Dreams of low-lying isles to June belong,
And Circe holds us in her haunts of ease;
But later, when these high ancestral trees
Are sear, and such Odyssean languors wrong
The reddening strength of the autumnal year,
Yield to heroic words thine ear and eye:
Intent on these broad pages thou shalt hear
The trumpet's blare, the Argive battle-cry,
And see Achilles hurl his hurtling spear,
And mark the Trojan arrows make reply.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

I.

EUTERPE.

Now if Euterpe held me not in scorn,

I'd shape a lyric, perfect, fair, and round
As that thin band of gold wherewith I bound
Your slender finger our betrothal morn.

Not of Desire alone is music born,

Not till the Muse wills is our passion crowned: Unsought she comes, if sought but seldom found. Hence is it poets often are forlorn,

Taciturn, shy, self-immolated, pale,

Taking no healthy pleasure in their kind, Wrapt in their dream as in a coat of mail. Hence is it I, the least, a very hind, Have stolen away into this leafy vale,

Drawn by the flutings of the silvery wind.

II.

PURSUIT AND POSSESSION.

WHEN I behold what pleasure is Pursuit,
What life, what glorious eagerness it is;
Then mark how full Possession falls from this,
How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit,
I am perplext, and often stricken mute,
Wondering which attained the higher bliss,
The winged insect, or the chrysalis
It thrust aside with unreluctant foot.

Spirit of verse which still eludes my art,

You shapes of loveliness that still do haunt me,

O never, never rest upon my heart,

If when I have thee I shall little want thee!

Still flit away in moonlight, rain, and dew,
Wills o' the wisp, that I may still pursue!