Folly and Time have fashioned Of thee a songless reed; O not-of-earth-impassioned! Thy music’s mute indeed. Red from the chantry crannies The orchids burn and swing, And where the arch began is Rest for a raven’s wing; And up the dinted column Quick tails of squirrels wave, And black, prodigious, solemn, A forest fills the nave. Still faith fuller, still faster, To ruin give thy heart: Perfect before the Master Aye as thou wert, thou art. But I am wind that passes In ignorance and tears, Uplifted from the grasses, Blown to the void of years, Blown to the void, yet sighing In thee to merge and cease, Last breath of beauty’s dying, Of sanctity, of peace! Though use nor place forever Unto my soul befall, By no belovèd river Set in a saintly wall, Do thou by builders given Speech of the dumb to be, Beneath thine open heaven, Athassel! pray for me. ROMANS IN DORSET. (TO A. B.) A stupor on the heath, And wrath along the sky; Space everywhere; beneath, The flat and treeless wold for us, with darkest noon on high. Sullen quiet below, But storm in upper air! A wind from long ago, In mouldy chambers of the cloud, had ripped an arras there, And singed the triple gloom, And let through, in a flame, Crowned faces of old Rome: Regnant, o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came. Uprisen like any sun, Through vistas hollow gray, Aloft, and one by one, In brazen casque, the Emperors loomed large, and sank away. In ovals of wan light, Each warrior eye and mouth: A pageant brutal bright, As if, once over, loudly passed Jove’s laughter in the south; And dimmer, these among, Some cameo’d head aloof, With ringlets heavy-hung, As golden stone-crop comely grows around the castle roof. An instant; gusts again, Then heaven’s impacted wall, The hot insistent rain, The thunder-shock: and of the Past, mirage no more at all. No more the alien dream Pursuing, as we went, With glory’s cursèd gleam; Nor sins of Cæsar’s ruined line engulphed us, innocent. The vision, great and dread, Corroded; sole in view Was empty Egdon spread, Her crimson summer weeds a-shake in tempest: but we knew What Tacitus had borne In that wrecked world we saw; And what, thine heart uptorn, My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law. LINES ON VARIOUS FLY-LEAVES. _TO GWENLLIAN E. F. MORGAN._ TO HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.