The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard,
The ants have brimm’d their garners with ripe grain,
        And honey been save stored
The sweets of summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing’d across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
        And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. 
          Alone, alone,
          Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone,
With the last leaves for a love-rosary;
Whilst all the wither’d world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drowned past
In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far-away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.

O go and sit with her, and be o’ershaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair;
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;—­
There is enough of wither’d everywhere
To make her bower,—­and enough of gloom;
There is enough of sadness to invite,
If only for the rose that died, whose doom
Is Beauty’s,—­she that with the living bloom
Of conscious cheeks most beautifies the light: 
There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,—­
Enough of chilly droppings from her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

SONNET.

SILENCE.

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—­under the deep deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—­no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free. 
That never spoke, over the idle ground: 
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyaena, calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,—­
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

SONNET.

WRITTEN IN KEATS’ “ENDYMION.”

I saw pale Dian, sitting by the brink
Of silver falls, the overflow of fountains
From cloudy steeps; and I grew sad to think
Endymion’s foot was silent on those mountains. 
And he but a hush’d name, that Silence keeps
In dear remembrance,—­lonely, and forlorn,
Singing it to herself until she weeps
Tears, that perchance still glisten in the morn:—­
And as I mused, in dull imaginings,
There came a flash of garments, and I knew
The awful Muse by her harmonious wings
Charming the air to music as she flew—­
Anon there rose an echo through the vale
Gave back Enydmion in a dreamlike tale.

SONNET.