Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
          Of pain, darkness, and cold. 
     For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
          The black minute’s at end,
     And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
          Shall dwindle, shall blend,
     Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
          Then a light, then thy breast,
     O thou soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again,
          And with God be the rest!

     THE PATRIOT

     AN OLD STORY

     It was roses, roses, all the way,
      With myrtle mixed in my path like mad: 
     The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
      The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
     A year ago on this very day.

     The air broke into a mist with bells,
      The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries. 
     Had I said, “Good folk, mere noise repels—­
      But give me your sun from yonder skies”
     They had answered, “And afterward, what else?”

     Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun
      To give it my loving friends to keep! 
     Naught man could do have I left undone;
      And you see my harvest, what I reap
     This very day, now a year is run.

     There’s nobody on the housetops now—­
      Just a palsied few at the windows set;
     For the best of the sight is, all allow,
      At the Shambles’ Gate—­or, better yet,
     By the very scaffold’s foot, I trow.

     I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
      A rope cuts both my wrists behind;
     And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
      For they fling, whoever has a mind,
     Stones at me for my year’s misdeeds.

     Thus I entered, and thus I go! 
      In triumphs, people have dropped down dead. 
     “Paid by the world, what dost thou owe
      Me?”—­God might question; now instead,
     ’Tis God shall repay:  I am safer so.

     ONE WORD MORE

     To E.B.B.

     London, September, 1855

     There they are, my fifty men and women,
     Naming me the fifty poems finished! 
     Take them, Love, the book and me together: 
     Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

     Raphael made a century of sonnets,
     Made and wrote them in a certain volume
     Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil
     Else he only used to draw Madonnas: 
     These, the world might view—­but one, the volume. 
     Who that one, you ask?  Your heart instructs you. 
     Did she live and love it all her lifetime? 
     Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets,
     Die and let it drop beside her pillow,
     Where it lay in place of Raphael’s glory,
     Raphael’s cheek so duteous and so loving—­
     Cheek the world was wont to hail a painter’s,
     Raphael’s cheek, her love had turned a poet’s?