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L'ENVOI.

You shake your head. A random string

Your finer female sense offends.

Well

were it not a pleasant thing

To fall asleep with all one's friends;

To pass with all our social ties.

To silence from the paths of men;

And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again;

To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars,
And wake on science grown to more,

On secrets of the brain, the stars,
As wild as aught of fairy lore;

And all that else the years will show,
The Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,
The Federations and the Powers;

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Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth,

And in the morning of the times.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep
Thro' sunny decads new and strange,
Or gay quinquenniads would we reap
The flower and quintessence of change.

Ah, yet would I — and would I might!

So much your eyes my fancy take Be still the first to leap to light

That I might kiss those eyes awake! For, am I right or am I wrong,

To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song,

And I will take my pleasure there: And, am I right or am I wrong,

My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song, Perforce will still revert to you;

Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curl'd, And evermore a costly kiss

The prelude to some brighter world.

For since the time when Adam first

Embraced his Eve in happy hour,

And

every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower,

What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes ?
What lips, like thine, so sweetly join'd?

Where on the double rosebud droops
The fullness of the pensive mind;
The pensive mind that, self-involved,
Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,

Which lets thee neither hear nor see:

But break it. In the name of wife,

And in the rights that name may give, Are clasp'd the moral of thy life,

And that for which I care to live.

EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,
And, if you find a meaning there,

O whisper to your glass, and say,

"What wonder, if he thinks me fair?

What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight

Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise,

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That float thro' Heaven, and cannot light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court

By Cupid-boys of blooming hueBut take it earnest wed with sport,

And either sacred unto you.

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,

But it is wild and barren,

A garden too with scarce a tree
And waster than a warren :

Yet say the neighbours when they call,
It is not bad but good land,

And in it is the germ of all

That

grows

within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,

And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion !

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