Coils the labyrinthine sea
  Duteous to the lunar will,
But some discord stealthily
  Vexes the world-ditty still,
And the bird that caws and caws
Clasps creation with his claws.

LUX PERDITA

Thine were the weak, slight hands
That might have taken this strong soul, and bent
Its stubborn substance to thy soft intent,
And bound it unresisting, with such bands
As not the arm of envious heaven had rent.

Thine were the calming eyes
That round my pinnace could have stilled the sea,
And drawn thy voyager home, and bid him be
Pure with their pureness, with their wisdom wise,
Merged in their light, and greatly lost in thee.

But thou—­thou passed’st on,
With whiteness clothed of dedicated days,
Cold, like a star; and me in alien ways
Thou leftest following life’s chance lure, where shone
The wandering gleam that beckons and betrays.

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES

She stands, a thousand-wintered tree,
  By countless morns impearled;
Her broad roots coil beneath the sea,
  Her branches sweep the world;
Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed,
  Clothe the remotest strand
With forests from her scatterings made,
New nations fostered in her shade,
  And linking land with land.

O ye by wandering tempest sown
  ’Neath every alien star,
Forget not whence the breath was blown
  That wafted you afar! 
For ye are still her ancient seed
  On younger soil let fall—­
Children of Britain’s island-breed,
To whom the Mother in her need
  Perchance may one day call.

HISTORY

Here, peradventure, in this mirror glassed,
Who gazes long and well at times beholds
Some sunken feature of the mummied Past,
But oftener only the embroidered folds
And soiled magnificence of her rent robe
Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties
That sweep the dust of aeons in our eyes
And with their trailing pride cumber the globe.—­
For lo! the high, imperial Past is dead: 
The air is full of its dissolved bones;
Invincible armies long since vanquished,
Kings that remember not their awful thrones,
Powerless potentates and foolish sages,
Impede the slow steps of the pompous ages.

THE EMPTY NEST

I saunter all about the pleasant place
  You made thrice pleasant, O my friends, to me;
But you are gone where laughs in radiant grace
  That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea. 
To storied precincts of the southern foam,
  Dear birds of passage, ye have taken wing,
And ah! for me, when April wafts you home,
  The spring will more than ever be the spring
Still lovely, as of old, this haunted ground;
  Tenderly, still, the autumn sunshine falls;
And gorgeously the woodlands tower around,
  Freak’d with wild light at golden intervals: 
Yet, for the ache your absence leaves, O friends,
Earth’s lifeless pageantries are poor amends.