O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. BREAK, BREAK, BREAK. Break, break, break On thy cold gray stones, O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still! Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, O sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. PEACE OR WAR? [From _Maud_.] Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by, When the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine, When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie; Peace in her vineyard--yes!--but a company forges the wine. And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head, Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife, While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread, And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life. And Sleep must lie down armed, for the villainous centre-bits Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights, While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits To pestle a poisoned poison behind his crimson lights. When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones, Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea, War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones. STANZAS FROM IN MEMORIAM. I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods: I envy not the beast that takes His license in the fields of time, Unfettered by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes; Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth, But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whatever befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. SONG FROM MAUD. Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown; Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the roses blown.