EARTH loves her young: a preference manifest: She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds; Their beauty with her choicest interthreads, And makes her revel of their merry zest; As in our East much were it in our West, If men had risen to do the work of heads. Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed. How wrought they in their zenith? ’Tis not writ; Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read: Have they but held her laws and nature dear, They mouth no sentence of inverted wit. More prizes she her beasts than this high breed Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear. SOCIETY HISTORIC be the survey of our kind, And how their brave Society took shape. Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape, The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find, Who, with some jars in harmony, combined, Their primal instincts taming, to escape The brawl indecent, and hot passions drape. Convenience pricked conscience, that the mind. Thus entered they the field of milder beasts, Which in some sort of civil order graze, And do half-homage to the God of Laws. But are they still for their old ravenous feasts, Earth gives the edifice they build no base: They spring another flood of fangs and claws. WINTER HEAVENS SHARP is the night, but stars with frost alive Leap off the rim of earth across the dome. It is a night to make the heavens our home More than the nest whereto apace we strive. Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, In swarms outrushing from the golden comb. They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: The living throb in me, the dead revive. Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, Life glistens on the river of the death. It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs Of radiance, the radiance enrings: And this is the soul’s haven to have felt. NOTES PHAETHON _The Galliambic Measure_ Hermann (_Elementa Doctrinae Metricae_), after citing lines from the Tragic poet Phrynichus and from the Comic, observes: Dixi supra, Phrynichorum versus videri puros Ionicos esse. Id si verum est, Galliambi non alia re ab his differunt, quam quod anaclasin, contractionesque et solutiones recipiunt. Itaque versus Galliambicus ex duobus versibus Anacreonteis constat, quorum secundus catalecticus est, hac forma: [Picture: Graphic depiction of scheme] The wonderful _Attis_ of Catullus is the one classic example. A few lines have been gathered elsewhere. Lord Tennyson’s _Boadicea_ rides over many difficulties and is a noble poem. Catullus makes general use of the variant second of the above metrical forms: _Mihi januae frequentes_, _mihi limina tepida_: With stress on the emotion; _Jam_, _jam dolet quod egi_, _jam jamque poenitet_.