Yes, I am here Just as last year, And the sea breathes brine From its strange straight line Up hither, the same As when we four came. —But two have wandered far From this grassy rise Into urban roar Where no picnics are, And one—has shut her eyes For evermore. THE SCHRECKHORN (_With thoughts of Leslie Stephen_) (June 1897) ALOOF, as if a thing of mood and whim; Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams Upon my nearing vision, less it seems A looming Alp-height than a guise of him Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb, Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe, Of semblance to his personality In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim. At his last change, when Life’s dull coils unwind, Will he, in old love, hitherward escape, And the eternal essence of his mind Enter this silent adamantine shape, And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose? A SINGER ASLEEP (_Algernon Charles Swinburne_, 1837–1909) I In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea, That sentrys up and down all night, all day, From cove to promontory, from ness to bay, The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally. II —It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria’s formal middle time His leaves of rhythm and rhyme. III O that far morning of a summer day When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, I walked and read with a quick glad surprise New words, in classic guise,— IV The passionate pages of his earlier years, Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears; Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who Blew them not naïvely, but as one who knew Full well why thus he blew. V I still can hear the brabble and the roar At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through That fitful fire of tongues then entered new! Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore; Thine swells yet more and more. VI —His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies; Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep Into the rambling world-encircling deep Which hides her where none sees. VII