She keeps the gift of years before, A wither’d violet is her bliss; She knows not what his greatness is; For that, for all, she loves him more. For him she plays, to him she sings Of early faith and plighted vows; She knows but matters of the house, And he, he knows a thousand things. Her faith is fixt and cannot move, She darkly feels him great and wise, She dwells on him with faithful eyes, ‘I cannot understand: I love.’ XCVI. You leave us: you will see the Rhine, And those fair hills I sail’d below, When I was there with him; and go By summer belts of wheat and vine To where he breathed his latest breath, That City. All her splendour seems No livelier than the wisp that gleams On Lethe in the eyes of Death. Let her great Danube rolling fair Enwind her isles, unmarked of me: I have not seen, I will not see Vienna; rather dream that there, A treble darkness, evil haunts The birth, the bridal; friend from friend, Is oftener parted, fathers bend Above more graves, a thousand wants Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey By each cold hearth, and sadness flings Her shadow on the blaze of kings: And yet myself have heard him say, That not in any mother town With statelier progress to and fro The double tides of chariots flow By park and suburb under brown Of lustier leaves; nor more content, He told me, lives in any crowd, When all is gay with lamps, and loud With sport and song, in booth and tent, Imperial halls, or open plain; And wheels the circled dance, and breaks The rocket molten into flakes Of crimson or in emerald rain. XCVII. Risest thou thus, dim dawn again, So loud with voices of the birds, So thick with lowings of the herds, Day, when I lost the flower of men; Who tremblest thro’ thy darkling red On yon swol’n brook that bubbles fast By meadows breathing of the past, And woodlands holy to the dead; Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves A song that slights the coming care, And Autumn laying here and there A fiery finger on the leaves; Who wakenest with thy balmy breath To myriads on the genial earth, Memories of bridal, or of birth, And unto myriads more, of death. O, wheresoever those may be, Betwixt the slumber of the poles, To-day they count as kindred souls; They know me not, but mourn with me. XCVIII. I wake, I rise: from end to end, Of all the landscape underneath I find no place that does not breathe Some gracious memory of my friend: