class="poetry">      That mirror
   Whose magic penetrates like a dart,
      Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,
      Until we start?

      That mirror
   Works well in these night hours of ache;
      Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves once take
      When the world is awake?

      That mirror
   Can test each mortal when unaware;
      Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,
      Glassing it—where?

THE VOICE OF THINGS

Forty Augusts—aye, and several more—ago,
   When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ,
The waves huzza’d like a multitude below
   In the sway of an all-including joy
      Without cloy.

Blankly I walked there a double decade after,
   When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,
And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter
   At the lot of men, and all the vapoury
      Things that be.

Wheeling change has set me again standing where
   Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide;
But they supplicate now—like a congregation there
   Who murmur the Confession—I outside,
      Prayer denied.

“WHY BE AT PAINS?”
(Wooer’s Song)

Why be at pains that I should know
   You sought not me?
Do breezes, then, make features glow
   So rosily?
Come, the lit port is at our back,
   And the tumbling sea;
Elsewhere the lampless uphill track
   To uncertainty!

O should not we two waifs join hands?
   I am alone,
You would enrich me more than lands
   By being my own.
Yet, though this facile moment flies,
   Close is your tone,
And ere to-morrow’s dewfall dries
   I plough the unknown.

“WE SAT AT THE WINDOW”
(Bournemouth, 1875)

We sat at the window looking out,
And the rain came down like silken strings
That Swithin’s day.  Each gutter and spout
Babbled unchecked in the busy way
   Of witless things:
Nothing to read, nothing to see
Seemed in that room for her and me
   On Swithin’s day.

We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,
For I did not know, nor did she infer
How much there was to read and guess
By her in me, and to see and crown
   By me in her.
Wasted were two souls in their prime,
And great was the waste, that July time
   When the rain came down.

AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK
(Circa 1850)

   On afternoons of drowsy calm
      We stood in the panelled pew,
Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm
      To the tune of “Cambridge New.”

   We watched the elms, we watched the rooks,
      The clouds upon the breeze,
Between the whiles of glancing at our books,
      And swaying like the trees.

   So mindless were those outpourings!—
      Though I am not aware
That I have gained by subtle thought on things
      Since we stood psalming there.

AT THE WICKET-GATE

There floated the sounds of church-chiming,
   But no one was nigh,
Till there came, as a break in the loneness,
   Her father, she, I.
And we slowly moved on to the wicket,
   And downlooking stood,
Till anon people passed, and amid them
   We parted for good.

Greater, wiser, may part there than we three
   Who parted there then,
But never will Fates colder-featured
   Hold sway there again.
Of the churchgoers through the still meadows
   No single one knew
What a play was played under their eyes there
   As thence we withdrew.

IN A MUSEUM

I

Here’s the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,
Which over the earth before man came was winging;
There’s a contralto voice I heard last night,
That lodges in me still with its sweet singing.

II

Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird
Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending
Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,
In the full-fugued song of the universe unending.

Exeter.

APOSTROPHE TO AN OLD PSALM TUNE

I met you first—ah, when did I first meet you?
When I was full of wonder, and innocent,
Standing meek-eyed with those of choric bent,
   While dimming day grew dimmer
      In the pulpit-glimmer.

Much riper in years I met you—in a temple
Where summer sunset streamed upon our shapes,
And you spread over me like a gauze that drapes,
   And flapped from floor to rafters,
      Sweet as angels’ laughters.

But you had been stripped of some of your old vesture
By Monk, or another.  Now you wore no frill,
And at first you startled me.  But I knew you still,
   Though I missed the minim’s waver,
      And the dotted quaver.

I grew accustomed to you thus.  And you hailed me
Through one who evoked you often.  Then at last
Your raiser was borne off, and I mourned you had passed
   From my life with your late outsetter;
      Till I said, “’Tis better!”

But you waylaid me.  I rose and went as a ghost goes,
And said, eyes-full “I’ll never hear it again!
It is overmuch for scathed and memoried men
   When sitting among strange people
      Under their steeple.”

Now, a new stirrer of tones calls you up before me
And wakes your speech, as she of Endor did
(When sought by Saul who, in disguises hid,
   Fell down on the earth to hear it)
      Samuel’s spirit.

So, your quired oracles beat till they make me tremble
As I discern your mien in the old attire,
Here in these turmoiled years of belligerent fire
   Living still on—and onward, maybe,
      Till Doom’s great day be!

Sunday, August 13, 1916.

AT THE WORD “FAREWELL”

She looked like a bird from a cloud
   On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
   In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room
   For my parting