the sky
     As thou in my soul;
     The sea takes her image to lie
     Where the white ripples roll
     All night in a dream,
     With the light of her beam,
     Hushedly, mournfully, mistily up to the shore. 
     The pebbles speak low
     In the ebb and the flow,
     As I when thy voice came at intervals, tuned to adore: 
     Nought other stirred
     Save my heart all unheard
     Beating to bliss that is past evermore.

     John Lackland

     A wicked man is bad enough on earth;
     But O the baleful lustre of a chief
     Once pledged in tyranny!  O star of dearth
     Darkly illumining a nation’s grief! 
     How many men have worn thee on their brows! 
     Alas for them and us!  God’s precious gift
     Of gracious dispensation got by theft —
     The damning form of false unholy vows! 
     The thief of God and man must have his fee: 
     And thou, John Lackland, despicable prince —
     Basest of England’s banes before or since! 
     Thrice traitor, coward, thief!  O thou shalt be
     The historic warning, trampled and abhorr’d
     Who dared to steal and stain the symbols of the Lord!

     The sleeping city

     A Princess in the eastern tale
     Paced thro’ a marble city pale,
     And saw in ghastly shapes of stone
     The sculptured life she breathed alone;

     Saw, where’er her eye might range,
     Herself the only child of change;
     And heard her echoed footfall chime
     Between Oblivion and Time;

     And in the squares where fountains played,
     And up the spiral balustrade,
     Along the drowsy corridors,
     Even to the inmost sleeping floors,

     Surveyed in wonder chilled with dread
     The seemingness of Death, not dead;
     Life’s semblance but without its storm,
     And silence frosting every form;

     Crowned figures, cold and grouping slaves,
     Like suddenly arrested waves
     About to sink, about to rise, —
     Strange meaning in their stricken eyes;

     And cloths and couches live with flame
     Of leopards fierce and lions tame,
     And hunters in the jungle reed,
     Thrown out by sombre glowing brede;

     Dumb chambers hushed with fold on fold,
     And cumbrous gorgeousness of gold;
     White casements o’er embroidered seats,
     Looking on solitudes of streets, —

     On palaces and column’d towers,
     Unconscious of the stony hours;
     Harsh gateways startled at a sound,
     With burning lamps all burnish’d round; —

     Surveyed in awe this wealth and state,
     Touched by the finger of a Fate,
     And drew with slow-awakening fear
     The sternness of the atmosphere; —

     And gradually, with stealthier foot,
     Became herself a thing as mute,
     And listened,—­while with swift alarm
     Her alien heart shrank from the charm;