The formal faced cohue Will then no more upbraid With smiting smiles and whisperings two Who have thrown less loves in shade. We shall no more evade The searching light of the sun, Our game of passion will be played, Our dreaming done. We shall not go in stealth To rendezvous unknown, But friends will ask me of your health, And you about my own. When we abide alone, No leapings each to each, But syllables in frigid tone Of household speech. When down to dust we glide Men will not say askance, As now: “How all the country side Rings with their mad romance!” But as they graveward glance Remark: “In them we lose A worthy pair, who helped advance Sound parish views.” THE DAWN AFTER THE DANCE HERE is your parents’ dwelling with its curtained windows telling Of no thought of us within it or of our arrival here; Their slumbers have been normal after one day more of formal Matrimonial commonplace and household life’s mechanic gear. I would be candid willingly, but dawn draws on so chillingly As to render further cheerlessness intolerable now, So I will not stand endeavouring to declare a day for severing, But will clasp you just as always—just the olden love avow. Through serene and surly weather we have walked the ways together, And this long night’s dance this year’s end eve now finishes the spell; Yet we dreamt us but beginning a sweet sempiternal spinning Of a cord we have spun to breaking—too intemperately, too well. Yes; last night we danced I know, Dear, as we did that year ago, Dear, When a new strange bond between our days was formed, and felt, and heard; Would that dancing were the worst thing from the latest to the first thing That the faded year can charge us with; but what avails a word! That which makes man’s love the lighter and the woman’s burn no brighter Came to pass with us inevitably while slipped the shortening year . . . And there stands your father’s dwelling with its blind bleak windows telling That the vows of man and maid are frail as filmy gossamere. WEYMOUTH, 1869. THE SUN ON THE LETTER I DREW the letter out, while gleamed The sloping sun from under a roof Of cloud whose verge rose visibly. The burning ball flung rays that seemed Stretched like a warp without a woof Across the levels of the lea To where I stood, and where they beamed As brightly on the page of proof That she had shown her false to me As if it had shown her true—had teemed With passionate thought for my behoof Expressed with their own ardency! THE NIGHT OF THE DANCE THE cold moon hangs to the sky by its horn, And centres its gaze on me; The stars, like eyes in reverie, Their westering as for a while forborne, Quiz downward curiously.