Yes, it is you: for evening holds those strands Of fire and darkness twined in one to make Your loveliness a web of magic mesh, Whose cross-weft harmony of soul and flesh Shadows a thought or glows, when smiles awake, Like sunlight passionate on southern lands. THE CHOICE. Comrade, now that you're merry And therefore true, Say--where would you like to die And have your friend to bury What once was you? "On the top of a hill With a peaceful view Of country where all is still?"... Great God, not I! I'd lie in the street Where two streams meet And there's noise enough to fill The outer ear, While within the brain can beat Marches of death and life, Glory and joy and fear, Peace of the sort that moves And clash of strife And routs of armies fleeing. There would I shake myself clear Out of the deep-set grooves Of my sluggish being. THE HIGHER SENSUALISM. There's a church by a lake in Italy Stands white on a hill against the sky? And a path of immemorial cobbles Leads up and up, where the pilgrim hobbles Past a score or so of neat reposories, Where you stop and breathe and tell your rosaries To the shrined terra-cotta mannikins, That expound with the liveliest quirks and grins Known texts of Scripture. But no long stay Should the pilgrim make upon his way; But as means to the end these shrines stand here To guide to something holier, The church on the hilltop. Your heaven's so, With a path leading up to it past a row Of votary Priapulids; At each you pause and tell your beads Along the quintuple strings of sense: Then on, to face Heaven's eminence, New stimulated, new inspired. SONNET. If that a sparkle of true starshine be That led my way; if some diviner thing Than common thought urged me to fashioning Close-woven links of burnished poetry; Then all the heaven that one time dwelt in me Has fled, leaving the body triumphing. Dead flesh it seems, with not a dream to bring Visions that better warm immediacy. Why have my visions left me, what could kill That feeble spark, which yet had life and heat? Fulfilment shewed a present rich and fair: I strive to mount, but catch the nearest still: Souls have been drowned between heart's beat and beat, And trapped and tangled in a woman's hair. FORMAL VERSES. I. Mother of all my future memories, Mistress of my new life, which but to-day Began, when I beheld, deep in your eyes, My own love mirrored and the warm surprise Of the first kiss swept both our souls away,