And brushing ankle-deep in flowers, We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in the pail, And buzzings of the honied hours. LXXXVIII. He tasted love with half his mind, Nor ever drank the inviolate spring Where nighest heaven, who first could fling This bitter seed among mankind; That could the dead, whose dying eyes Were closed with wail, resume their life. They would but find in child and wife An iron welcome when they rise: ’Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine, To pledge them with a kindly tear: To talk them o’er, to wish them here, To count their memories half divine; But if they came who past away, Behold their brides in other hands: The hard heir strides about their lands, And will not yield them for a day. Yea, tho’ their sons were none of these, Not less the yet-lov’d sire would make Confusion worse than death, and shake The pillars of domestic peace. Ah dear, but come thou back to me: Whatever change the years have wrought, I find not yet one lonely thought That cries against my wish for thee. LXXXIX. When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, And rarely pipes the mounted thrush; Or underneath the barren bush Flits by the sea-blue bird of March; Come, wear the form by which I know Thy spirit in time among thy peers; The hope of unaccomplish’d years Be large and lucid round thy brow. When summer’s hourly-mellowing change May breathe with many roses sweet Upon the thousand waves of wheat, That ripple round the lonely grange; Come: not in watches of the night, But where the sunbeam broodeth warm, Come, beauteous in thine after form, And like a finer light in light. XC. If any vision should reveal Thy likeness, I might count it vain As but the canker of the brain; Yea, though it spake and made appeal To chances where our lots were cast Together in the days behind, I might but say, I hear a wind Of memory murmuring the past. Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view A fact within the coming year; And tho’ the months, revolving near, Should prove the phantom-warning true, They might not seem thy prophecies, But spiritual presentiments, And such refraction of events As often rises ere they rise. XCI. I shall not see thee. Dare I say No spirit ever brake the band That stays him from the native land, Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay? No visual shade of some one lost, But he, the Spirit himself, may come Where all the nerve of sense is numb; Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.