Love's feet are stained with clay and travel-sore,
And dusty are Song's lucent wing and hairs.

O Love, that must do courtesy to decay,
Eat hasty bread standing with loins up-girt,

How shall this stead thy feet for their sore way?
Ah, Song, what brief embraces balm thy hurt!

Had Jacob's toil full guerdon, casting his
Twice-seven heaped years to burn in Rachel's kiss?

{2} The Ark of the Egyptian temple was sealed with clay, which the
Pontiff-king broke when he entered the inner shrine to offer

worship.
THE HEART.

Two Sonnets.
(To my Critic, who had objected to the phrase--'The heart's burning

floors.')
I

The heart you hold too small and local thing,
Such spacious terms of edifice to bear.

And yet, since Poesy first shook out her wing,
The mighty Love has been impalaced there;

That has she given him as his wide demesne,
And for his sceptre ample empery;

Against its door to knock has Beauty been
Content; it has its purple canopy

A dais for the sovereign lady spread
Of many a lover, who the heaven would think

Too low an awning for her sacred head.
The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink--

Yet shall that chasm, till He Who these did build
An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled.

II
O nothing, in this corporal earth of man,

That to the imminent heaven of his high soul
Responds with colour and with shadow, can

Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll
Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph

Be mighty through its mighty habitants;
If God be in His Name; grave potence if

The sounds unbind of hieratic chants;
All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm

Nature is whole in her least things exprest,
Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm.

Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart

The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.
A SUNSET.

From Hugo's 'Feuilles d'Automne'.
I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens,

Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens,
In numerous leafage bosomed close;

Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer,
Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere

On cloudy archipelagos.
Oh gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion,

Up-piled in the immensesublime beneath the winds' commotion,
Their unimagined shapes accord:

Under their waves at intervals flames a pale levin through,
As if some giant of the air amid the vapours drew

A sudden elemental sword.
The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold;

And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold,
The thatched roof of a cot a-glance;

Or on the blurred horizons joins his battle with the haze;
Or pools the glooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze

Great moveless meres of radiance.
Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track

Yonder a mightycrocodile with vast irradiant back,
A triple row of pointed teeth?

Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide,
The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds its tenebrous side

With scales of golden mail ensheathe.
Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees.

Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice
Ruins immense in mounded wrack:

Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone
Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown

When the earthquake heaves its hugy back.
These vapours with their leaden, golden, iron, bronz-ed glows,

Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose,
Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms,

'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep,
As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep

His dreadful and resounding arms!
All vanishes! The sun, from topmost heaven precipitated,

Like to a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red
Into the furnace stirred to fume,

Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire,
Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire

The vaporous and inflam-ed spume.
O contemplate the heavens! whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale,

In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil,
With love that has not speech for need;

Beneath their solemn beauty is a mysteryinfinite:
If winter hue them like a pall; or if the summer night

Fantasy them with starry brede.
HEARD ON THE MOUNTAIN.

From Hugo's 'Feuilles d'Automne'.
Have you sometimes, calm, silent, let your tread aspirant rise

Up to the mountain's summit, in the presence of the skies?
Was't on the borders of the South? or on the Bretagne coast?

And at the basis of the mount had you the Ocean tossed?
And there, leaned o'er the wave and o'er the immeasurableness,

Calm, silent, have you harkened what it says? Lo, what it says!
One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicens-ed to muse,

Had drooped its wing above the beach-ed margent of the ooze,
And, plunging from the mountain height into the immensity,

Beheld upon one side the land, on the other side the sea.
I harkened, comprehended,--never, as from those abysses,

No, never issued from a mouth, nor moved an ear, such voice as this
is!

A sound it was, at outset, vast, immeasurable, confused,
Vaguer than is the wind among the tufted trees effused,

Full of magnificent accords, suave murmurs, sweet as is
The evensong, and mighty as the shock of panoplies

When the hoarse melee in its arms the closing squadrons grips,
And pants, in furious breathings, from the clarions' brazen lips.

Unutterable the harmony, unsearchable its deep,
Whose fluid undulations round the world a girdle keep,

And through the vasty heavens, which by its surges are washed young,
Its infinite volutions roll, enlarging as they throng,

Even to the profound arcane, whose ultimate chasms sombre
Its shattered flood englut with time, with space and form and

number.
Like to another atmosphere with thin o'erflowing robe,

The hymn eternal covers all the inundated globe:
And the world, swathed about with this investuring symphony,

Even as it trepidates in the air, so trepidates in the harmony.
And pensive, I attended the ethereal lutany,

Lost within this containing voice as if within the sea.
Soon I distinguished, yet as tone which veils confuse and smother,