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ALFRED TENNYSON.

Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,

The tender blossom flutter down; Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away;

Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,

Ray round with flames her disk of seed, And many a rose-carnation feed With summer spice the humming air;

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser Wain
Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break

The sailing moon in creek and cove;

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger's child;

As year by year the laborer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.

DOUBT.

You say, but with no touch of scorn, Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes

Are tender over drowning flies, You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.

I know not one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed, Who touched a jarring lyre at first, But ever strove to make it true:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,

At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

He fought his doubts and gathered strength,

He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own;

And Power was with him in the night,

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O YET We trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall
At last far off-at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

THE wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature, then, at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope through darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

"So careful of the type?" but no.

From scarpéd cliff and quarried stone She cries, "A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.

"Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more." And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law, Though Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravin, shrieked against his creed,

Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.

GARDEN SONG,

COME into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,

And the musk of the roses blown.

For a breeze of morning moves,

And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

On a bed of daffodil sky, To faint in the light of the sun she loves, To faint in his light, and to die.

All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine
stirred

To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.

I said to the lily, "There is but one
With whom she has heart to be gay.
When will the dancers leave her alone?
She is weary of dance and play."
Now half to the setting moon are gone,
And half to the rising day;
Low on the sand and loud on the stone
The last wheel echoes away.

I said to the rose, "The brief night goes
In babble and revel and wine.
O young lord-lover, what sighs are those,
For one that will never be thine?
But mine, but mine," so I sware to the

rose,

"For ever and ever, mine."

And the soul of the rose went into my blood,

As the music clashed in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,

Our wood, that is dearer than all;

From the meadow your walks have left So sweet

That whenever a March-wind sighs He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes,

To the woody hollows in which we meet And the valleys of Paradise.

The slender acacia would not shake

One long milk-bloom on the tree; The white lake-blossom fell into the lake As the pimpernel dozed on the lea; But the rose was awake all night for your

sake,

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