But, children, at midnight, When soft the winds blow, When clear falls the moonlight, When spring-tides are low; When sweet airs come seaward From heaths starred with broom, And high rocks throw mildly On the blanched sands a gloom; Up the still, glistening beaches, Up the creeks we will hie, Over banks of bright seaweed The ebb-tide leaves dry. We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the white sleeping town; At the church on the hill-side, And then come back down, Singing, “There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she! She left lonely forever The kings of the sea.” SONNETS. _AUSTERITY OF POETRY._ That son of Italy who tried to blow,[8] Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song, In his light youth amid a festal throng Sate with his bride to see a public show. Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow Youth like a star; and what to youth belong,-- Gay raiment sparkling gauds, elation strong. A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! Lo, Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay! Shuddering, they drew her garments off--and found A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin. Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay, Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within. _A PICTURE AT NEWSTEAD._ What made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell?-- ’Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry Stormily sweet, his Titan-agony; It was the sight of that Lord Arundel Who struck, in heat, his child he loved so well, And his child’s reason flickered, and did die. Painted (he willed it) in the gallery They hang; the picture doth the story tell. Behold the stern, mailed father, staff in hand! The little fair-haired son, with vacant gaze, Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are! Methinks the woe, which made that father stand Baring his dumb remorse to future days, Was woe than Byron’s woe more tragic far. _RACHEL._ I. In Paris all looked hot and like to fade; Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries, Sere with September, drooped the chestnut-trees; was dawn, a brougham rolled through the streets, and made Halt at the white and silent colonnade Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease, Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease, Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls surveyed. She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine; Why stops she by this empty playhouse drear? Ah! where the spirit its highest life hath led, All spots, matched with that spot, are less divine; And Rachel’s Switzerland, her Rhine, is here! II. Unto a lonely villa, in a dell Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore, The dying Rachel in a chair they bore Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,