And from his inmost hold
  The answer rolled: 
“Thy bondman to remain
  Is sweeter pain,
Dearer an hundredfold.”

LIFE WITHOUT HEALTH

Behold life builded as a goodly house
And grown a mansion ruinous
With winter blowing through its crumbling walls! 
The master paceth up and down his halls,
And in the empty hours
Can hear the tottering of his towers
And tremor of their bases underground. 
And oft he starts and looks around
At creaking of a distant door
Or echo of his footfall on the floor,
Thinking it may be one whom he awaits
And hath for many days awaited,
Coming to lead him through the mouldering gates
Out somewhere, from his home dilapidated.

TO A FRIEND

CHAFING AT ENFORCED IDLENESS FROM INTERRUPTED HEALTH

Soon may the edict lapse, that on you lays
This dire compulsion of infertile days,
This hardest penal toil, reluctant rest! 
Meanwhile I count you eminently blest,
Happy from labours heretofore well done,
Happy in tasks auspiciously begun. 
For they are blest that have not much to rue—­
That have not oft mis-heard the prompter’s cue,
Stammered and stumbled and the wrong parts played,
And life a Tragedy of Errors made.

“WELL HE SLUMBERS, GREATLY SLAIN”

Well he slumbers, greatly slain,
  Who in splendid battle dies;
Deep his sleep in midmost main
  Pillowed upon pearl who lies.

Ease, of all good gifts the best,
  War and wave at last decree: 
Love alone denies us rest,
  Crueller than sword or sea.

AN EPISTLE

(To N.A.)

So, into Cornwall you go down,
And leave me loitering here in town. 
For me, the ebb of London’s wave,
Not ocean-thunder in Cornish cave. 
My friends (save only one or two)
Gone to the glistening marge, like you,—­
The opera season with blare and din
Dying sublime in Lohengrin,—­
Houses darkened, whose blinded panes
All thoughts, save of the dead, preclude,—­
The parks a puddle of tropic rains,—­
Clubland a pensive solitude,—­
For me, now you and yours are flown,
The fellowship of books alone!

For you, the snaky wave, upflung
With writhing head and hissing tongue;
The weed whose tangled fibres tell
Of some inviolate deep-sea dell;
The faultless, secret-chambered shell,
Whose sound is an epitome
Of all the utterance of the sea;
Great, basking, twinkling wastes of brine;
Far clouds of gulls that wheel and swerve
In unanimity divine,
With undulation serpentine,
And wondrous, consentaneous curve,
Flashing in sudden silver sheen,
Then melting on the sky-line keen;
The world-forgotten coves that seem
Lapt in some magic old sea-dream,