’Tis thought Odysseus when the strife was o’er With all the waves and wars, a weary while, Grew restless in his disenchanted isle, And still would watch the sunset, from the shore, Go down the ways of gold, and evermore His sad heart followed after, mile on mile, Back to the Goddess of the magic wile, Calypso, and the love that was of yore. Thou too, thy haven gained, must turn thee yet To look across the sad and stormy space, Years of a youth as bitter as the sea, Ah, with a heavy heart, and eyelids wet, Because, within a fair forsaken place The life that might have been is lost to thee. HOMER. Homer, thy song men liken to the sea With all the notes of music in its tone, With tides that wash the dim dominion Of Hades, and light waves that laugh in glee Around the isles enchanted; nay, to me Thy verse seems as the River of source unknown That glasses Egypt’s temples overthrown In his sky-nurtured stream, eternally. No wiser we than men of heretofore To find thy sacred fountains guarded fast; Enough, thy flood makes green our human shore, As Nilus Egypt, rolling down his vast His fertile flood, that murmurs evermore Of gods dethroned, and empires in the past. THE BURIAL OF MOLIÈRE. (AFTER J. TRUFFIER.) Dead—he is dead! The rouge has left a trace On that thin cheek where shone, perchance, a tear, Even while the people laughed that held him dear But yesterday. He died,—and not in grace, And many a black-robed caitiff starts apace To slander him whose _Tartuffe_ made them fear, And gold must win a passage for his bier, And bribe the crowd that guards his resting-place. Ah, Molière, for that last time of all, Man’s hatred broke upon thee, and went by, And did but make more fair thy funeral. Though in the dark they hid thee stealthily, Thy coffin had the cope of night for pall, For torch, the stars along the windy sky! BION. The wail of Moschus on the mountains crying The Muses heard, and loved it long ago; They heard the hollows of the hills replying, They heard the weeping water’s overflow; They winged the sacred strain—the song undying, The song that all about the world must go,— When poets for a poet dead are sighing, The minstrels for a minstrel friend laid low. And dirge to dirge that answers, and the weeping For Adonais by the summer sea, The plaints for Lycidas, and Thyrsis (sleeping Far from ‘the forest ground called Thessaly’), These hold thy memory, Bion, in their keeping, And are but echoes of the moan for thee. SPRING. (AFTER MELEAGER.)