No, indeed! for God above Is great to grant, as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love: I claim you still, for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few: Much is to learn and much to forget Ere the time be come for taking you. But the time will come,--at last it will, When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I shall say, In the lower earth, in the years long still, That body and soul so pure and gay? Why your hair was amber, I shall divine, And your mouth of your own geranium's red-- And what you would do with me, in fine, In the new life come in the old one's stead. * * * * * I loved you, Evelyn, all the while! My heart seemed full as it could hold-- There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, And the red young mouth and the hair's young gold. So, hush,--I will give you this leaf to keep-- See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand. There, that is our secret! go to sleep; You will wake, and remember, and understand. Or, again, the tragedy of ingratitude and crumbled aspirations ends--as the world might say--upon the scaffold. It was roses, roses, all the way, With myrtle mixed in my path like mad: The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, The church-spires flamed, such flags they had, A year ago on this very day! * * * * * There's nobody on the house-tops now-- Just a palsied few at the windows set; For the best of the sight is, all allow, At the Shambles' Gate--or, better yet, By the very scaffold's foot, I trow. I go in the rain, and, more than needs, A rope cuts both my wrists behind; And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, For they fling, whoever has a mind, Stones at me for my year's misdeeds. Thus I entered Brescia, and thus I go! In triumphs, people have dropped down dead. "Thou, paid by the World,--what dost thou owe Me?" God might question: but now instead, 'Tis God shall requite! I am safer so. In all these, as in _Childe Roland_, that forlorn romance of dreary and depressed heroism, "the trumpet-note of the soul's victory rings through the darkness of terrestrial defeat": Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers my peers,-- How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.