_Is that thy need?_--Truly the all-complete Imperious need of every mortal lover Since life was lived in Time and Time was rover-- To carve the image of that passing-sweet Swift withering flower of Beauty naméd Love; To crystallize a moment’s grace for ever. (“_The old old plea yet that is not enough!_” _Words whisper_); to seize Joy; to stay the river Of ever-flowing water bearing down To shadowy oceans all we crave to mind us Of Beauty and her heart of perfect peace. Words, aid me! Set your Time-defying crown On all my heart would never more release. Where wait ye, words? _Here._ Come! _No, poet, find us!_ MADNESS “Nothing without a cause,” You say. _Why did the wind Point with a thin Lean finger then?_ “Laws behind the laws, And behind all a mind.” _A mind: just so. Somebody telling it to!_ _Bidding it point and beckon And wave; Bidding it blast and blacken All life was, With thoughts of one in a grave, And wind stroking the grass._ GLOUCESTERSHIRE MEN Gloucester, Glevum, and Caer Glow, The name is nothing! Then as now Men mowed the meadow-grass for cattle, Died for Gloucestershire in battle, Fought, and loved, and built, and planned, And wrested with this kindly land. Man’s tiny spark of mortal fire Seems suddenly big in Gloucestershire. The little chain of life on earth Lengthens out round Minsterworth. Here and in all the country round Marks of men are on the ground. Here no brooding iron peak, No barren desert is, to shriek The little loneliness of man, Whose days are measured by a span; But in the faces of our brothers See we the looks of those old “others”: The men in yonder humped-up barrow, Crouched with their mortal joys and sorrow; The Roman soldier sound asleep By walls where English weeds slow creep (A thousand years are but a span ...): Each dead man was a Gloucestershire man! A BALLADE OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE TOWNS Or ever in Cheltenham town dyspeptic flaunted His finery, or steel-clad Normans came To build that tower at Tewkesbury bird-haunted: Or ever rose that town of olden fame-- Ciceter, out of Roman arms and flame: Before the older Bristol was begot Of Keltic fathers: Caer Glow was a name. Old Gloucester reigns the king of all the lot! Caer Glow, “the splendid city,” so they called it, Those funny beggars brilliant in woad; And then the tramping Romans came and walled it And called it Glevum, throwing many a road Through and around it. Dane and Saxon strode Awhile its streets; then they whose quills did blot That Domesday Book which every city showed, Old Gloucester reigns the king of all the lot!