XVII.

THOU comest, much wept for; such a breeze Compelled thy canvas, and my prayer Was as the whisper of an air

To breathe thee over lonely seas.

For I in spirit saw thee move

Through circles of the bounding sky; Week after week: the days go by: Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

Henceforth, wherever thou mayst roam,
My blessing, like a line of light,
Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.

So may whatever tempest mars

Mid-ocean spare thee, sacred bark;
And balmy drops in summer dark

Slide from the bosom of the stars.

So kind an office hath been done,

Such precious relics brought by thee;

The dust of him I shall not see

Till all my widowed race be run.

XVIII.

'Tis well, 't is something, we may stand Where he in English earth is laid, And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

'Tis little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest Among familiar names to rest, And in the places of his youth.

Come, then, pure hands, and bear the head

That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep;
And come, whatever loves to weep,

And hear the ritual of the dead.

Ah! yet, even yet, if this might be,

I, falling on his faithful heart,

Would, breathing through his lips, impart

The life that almost dies in me:

That dies not, but endures with pain, And slowly forms the firmer mind, Treasuring the look it cannot find, The words that are not heard again.

XIX.

THE Danube to the Severn gave

The darkened heart that beat no more;

They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills,

The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills.

The Wye is hushed nor moved along;

And hushed my deepest grief of all,
When, filled with tears that cannot fall,

I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again

Is vocal in its wooded walls:

My deeper anguish also falls,

And I can speak a little then.