Dusky slaves and pallid,
  Ebon slaves and white,
When the Queen was on her throne
  How you sang to-night! 
Ah, the throats of thunder! 
  Ah, the dulcet lips! 
Ah, the gracious tyrannies
  Of her finger-tips!

Silent, silent, silent,
  All your voices now;
Was it then her life alone
  Did your life endow? 
Waken, throats of thunder! 
  Waken, dulcet lips! 
Touched to immortality
  By her finger-tips.

“Scentless flow’rs I bring thee”

Scentless flow’rs I bring thee—­yet
In thy bosom be they set;
In thy bosom each one grows
Fragrant beyond any rose.

Sweet enough were she who could,
In thy heart’s sweet neighbourhood,
Some redundant sweetness thus
Borrow from that overplus.

ON LANDOR’S “HELLENICS”

Come hither, who grow cloyed to surfeiting
With lyric draughts o’ersweet, from rills that rise
On Hybla not Parnassus mountain:  come
With beakers rinsed of the dulcifluous wave
Hither, and see a magic miracle
Of happiest science, the bland Attic skies
True-mirrored by an English well;—­no stream
Whose heaven-belying surface makes the stars
Reel, with its restless idiosyncrasy;
But well unstirred, save when at times it takes
Tribute of lover’s eyelids, and at times
Bubbles with laughter of some sprite below.

TO ——­

(With A volume of epigrams)

Unto the Lady of The Nook
    Fly, tiny book. 
There thou hast lovers—­even thou! 
    Fly thither now.

Seven years hast thou for honour yearned,
    And scant praise earned;
But ah! to win, at last, such friends,
    Is full amends.

ON EXAGGERATED DEFERENCE TO FOREIGN LITERARY OPINION

What! and shall we, with such submissive airs
As age demands in reverence from the young,
Await these crumbs of praise from Europe flung,
And doubt of our own greatness till it bears
The signet of your Goethes or Voltaires? 
We who alone in latter times have sung
With scarce less power than Arno’s exiled tongue—­
We who are Milton’s kindred, Shakespeare’s heirs. 
The prize of lyric victory who shall gain
If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm? 
More than the froth and flotsam of the Seine,
More than your Hugo-flare against the night,
And more than Weimar’s proud elaborate calm,
One flash of Byron’s lightning, Wordsworth’s light.

ENGLAND TO IRELAND

(February 1888)

Spouse whom my sword in the olden time won me,
  Winning me hatred more sharp than a sword—­
Mother of children who hiss at or shun me,
  Curse or revile me, and hold me abhorred—­
Heiress of anger that nothing assuages,
  Mad for the future, and mad from the past—­
Daughter of all the implacable ages,
  Lo, let us turn and be lovers at last!