Hawthorn and Lavender | Page 5

roses, love and death--
What else is left to send?
For what is life but love, the means,
And death, true Wife, the end?
XXXI
These glad, these great, these goodly days
Bewildering hope,
outrunning praise,
The Earth, renewed by the great Sun's longing,
Utters her joy in a
million ways!
What is there left, sweet Soul and true--
What, for us and our dream
to do?
What but to take this mighty Summer
As it were made for me and
you?
Take it and live it beam by beam,
Motes of light on a gleaming
stream,
Glare by glare and glory on glory
Through to the ash of this flaming

dream!
XXXII
The downs, like uplands in Eden,
Gleam in an afterglow
Like a rose-world ruining earthwards--
Mystical, wistful, slow!
Near and afar in the leafage,
That last glad call to the nest!
And the thought of you hangs and
triumphs
With Hesper low in the west!
Till the song and the light and the colour,
The passion of earth and sky,
Are blent in a rapture of boding
Of the death we should one day die.
XXXIII
The time of the silence
Of birds is upon us:
Rust in the chestnut leaf,

Dust in the stubble:
The turn of the Year
And the call to decay.
Stately and splendid,
The Summer passes:
Sad with satiety,
Sick
with fulfilment;
Spent and consumed,
But august till the end.
By wilting hedgerows
And white-hot highways,
Bearing its
memories
Even as a burden,
The tired heart plods
For a place of
rest.
XXXIV
There was no kiss that day?
No intimate Yea-and-Nay,
No sweets

in hand, no tender, lingering touch?
None of those desperate,
exquisite caresses,
So instant--O, so brief!--and yet so much,
The
thought of the swiftest lifts and blesses?
Nor any one of those great
royal words,
Those sovran privacies of speech,
Frank as the call of
April birds,
That, whispered, live a life of gold
Among the heart's
still sainted memories,
And irk, and thrill, and ravish, and beseech,

Even when the dream of dreams in death's a-cold?
No, there was
none of these,
Dear one, and yet--
O, eyes on eyes! O, voices
breaking still,
For all the watchful will,
Into a kinder kindness than
seemed due
From you to me, and me to you!
And that hot-eyed,
close-throated, blind regret
Of woman and man baulked and debarred
the blue!--
No kiss--no kiss that day?
Nay, rather, though we
seemed to wear the rue,
Sweet friend, how many, and how
goodly--say!
XXXV
Sing to me, sing, and sing again,
My glad, great-throated nightingale:
Sing, as the good sun through
the rain--
Sing, as the home-wind in the sail!
Sing to me life, and toil, and time,
O bugle of dawn, O flute of rest!
Sing, and once more, as in the
prime,
There shall be naught but seems the best.
And sing me at the last of love:
Sing that old magic of the May,
That makes the great world laugh
and move

As lightly as our dream to-day!
XXXVI
_We sat late_, _late_--_talking of many things_.
_He told me of his
grief_, _and_, _in the telling_,
_The gist of his tale showed to me_,
_rhymed_, _like this_.
It came, the news, like a fire in the night,
That life and its best were done;
And there was never so dazed a
wretch
In the beat of the living sun.
I read the news, and the terms of the news
Reeled random round my brain
Like the senseless, tedious buzzle and
boom
Of a bluefly in the pane.
So I went for the news to the house of the news,
But the words were left unsaid,
For the face of the house was blank
with blinds,
And I knew that she was dead.
XXXVII
'Twas in a world of living leaves
That we two reaped and bound our
sheaves:
They were of white roses and red,
And in the scything they
were dead.
Now the high Autumn flames afield,
And what is all his golden yield

To that we took, and sheaved, and bound
In the green dusk that
gladdened round?

Yet must the memory grieve and ache
Of that we did for dear love's
sake,
But may no more under the sun,
Being, like our summer,
spent and done.
XXXVIII
Since those we love and those we hate,
With all things mean and all
things great,
Pass in a desperate disarray
_Over the hills and far
away_:
It must be, Dear, that, late or soon,
Out of the ken of the watching
moon,
We shall abscond with Yesterday
_Over the hills and far
away_.
What does it matter? As I deem,
We shall but follow as brave a
dream
As ever smiled a wanton May
_Over the hills and far away_.
We shall remember, and, in pride,
Fare forth, fulfilled and satisfied,

Into the land of Ever-and-Aye,
_Over the hills and far away_.
XXXIX
These were the woods of wonder
We found so close and boon,
When the bride-month in her beauty
Lay mouth to mouth with June.
November, the old, lean widow,
Sniffs, and snivels, and shrills,
And the bowers are all dismantled,
And the long grass wets and chills;
And I hate these dismal dawnings,
These miserable even-ends,
These