Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
   Oh the happy hours we lay
Deep in fern on Airly Beacon,
   Courting through the summer’s day!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
   Oh the weary haunt for me,
All alone on Airly Beacon,
   With his baby on my knee!

1847.

SAPPHO

She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
Above her glared the noon; beneath, the sea. 
Upon the white horizon Atho’s peak
Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead;
The cicale slept among the tamarisk’s hair;
The birds sat dumb and drooping.  Far below
The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun;
The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings;
The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge,
And sank again.  Great Pan was laid to rest;
And Mother Earth watched by him as he slept,
And hushed her myriad children for a while. 
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear,
But left her tossing still; for night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
Till all her veins ran fever; and her cheek,
Her long thin hands, and ivory-channelled feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul. 
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward: 
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon. 
Beside her lay her lyre.  She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by.—­’Ah, hush!’ she cries;
’Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine! 
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies? 
Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.’

Eversley, 1847
From Yeast.

THE BAD SQUIRE

The merry brown hares came leaping
   Over the crest of the hill,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
   Under the moonlight still.

Leaping late and early,
   Till under their bite and their tread
The swedes and the wheat and the barley
   Lay cankered and trampled and dead.

A poacher’s widow sat sighing
   On the side of the white chalk bank,
Where under the gloomy fir-woods
   One spot in the ley throve rank.

She watched a long tuft of clover,
   Where rabbit or hare never ran;
For its black sour haulm covered over
   The blood of a murdered man.

She thought of the dark plantation,
   And the hares, and her husband’s blood,
And the voice of her indignation
   Rose up to the throne of God.