I looked without, and lo! my sonne

Came riding downe with might and main : He raised a shout as he drew on,

Till all the welkin rang again, 'Elizabeth! Elizabeth!'

(A sweeter woman ne'er drew breath Than my son's wife, Elizabeth.)

'The old sea wall (he cried) is downe, The rising tide comes on apace,

And boats adrift in yonder towne

Go sailing uppe the market-place.'

He shook as one that looks on death:

'God save you, mother!' straight he saith; 'Where is my wife, Elizabeth ??

'Good sonne, where Lindis winds away, With her two bairns I marked her long;

And ere yon bells beganne to play

Afar I heard her milking song.' He looked across the grassy lea,

To right, to left, 'Ho Enderby!'

They rang 'The Brides of Enderby '!

With that he cried and beat his breast;
For lo! along the river's bed
A mighty eygre reared his crest,
And uppe the Lindis raging sped.
It swept with thunderous noises loud;
Shaped like a curling snow-white cloud,
Or like a demon in a shroud.

And rearing Lindis backward pressed

Shook all her trembling bankes amaine;

Then madly at the eygre's breast

Flung up her weltering walls again.

Then bankes came downe with ruin and rout

Then beaten foam flew round about

Then all the mighty floods were out.

So far, so fast the eygre drave,
The heart had hardly time to beat,
Before a shallow seething wave

Sobbed in the grasses at oure feet:
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea.

Upon the roofe we sat that night,

The noise of bells went sweeping by;

I marked the lofty beacon light

Stream from the church tower, red and high

A lurid mark and dread to see;

And awesome bells they were to mee,
That in the dark rang 'Enderby.'

They rang the sailor lads to guide

From roofe to roofe who fearless rowed;

And I-my sonne was at my side,

And yet the ruddy beacon glowed;

And yet he moaned beneath his breath,

'O come in life, or come in death!

O lost! my love, Elizabeth.'.

And didst thou visit him no more?

Thou didst, thou didst, my daughter deare;

The waters laid thee at his doore,

Ere yet the early dawn was clear. Thy pretty bairns in fast embrace, The lifted sun shone on thy face, Downe drifted to thy dwelling-place.

That flow strewed wrecks about the grass,
That ebbe swept out the flocks to sea;
A fatal ebbe and flow, alas !

To manye more than myne and mee:
But each will mourn his own (she saith),
And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
Than my sonne's wife, Elizabeth.

I shall never hear her more,

By the reedy Lindis shore,
'Cusha! Cusha! Cusha!' calling
Ere the early dews be falling ;
I shall never hear her song,
'Cusha! Cusha!' all along

Where the sunny Lindis floweth,

Goeth, floweth ;

From the meads where melick groweth,

When the water winding down,

Onward floweth to the town.

I shall never see her more

Where the reeds and rushes quiver,

Shiver, quiver;

Stand beside the sobbing river,
Sobbing, throbbing in its falling
To the sandy lonesome shore;
I shall never hear her calling,
'Leave your meadow grasses mellow,
Mellow, mellow;

Quit your cowslips, cowslips yellow;

Come uppe Whitefoot, Come uppe Lightfoot;

Quit your pipes of parsley hollow,

Hollow, hollow;

Come uppe Lightfoot, rise and follow;

Lightfoot, Whitefoot,

From your clovers lift your head;

Come uppe Jetty, follow, follow,

Jetty to the milking shed.'

WHEN SPARROWS BUILD.

When sparrows build, and the leaves break forth, My old sorrow wakes and cries,

For I know there is dawn in the far, far north,

And a scarlet sun doth rise;

Like a scarlet fleece the snow-field spreads,

And the icy founts run free,

And the bergs begin to bow their heads,

And plunge, and sail in the sea

O my lost love, and my own, own love,
And my love that loved me so!

Is there never a chink in the world above

Where they listen for words from below?
Nay, I spoke once, and I grieved thee sore,
I remember all that I said,

And now thou wilt hear me no more-no more
Till the sea gives up her dead.

Thou didst set thy foot on the ship, and sail
To the ice-fields and the snow;

Thou wert sad, for thy love did nought avail,
And the end I could not know;

How could I tell I should love thee to-day,
Whom that day I held not dear?

How could I know I should love thee away
When I did not love thee anear?

We shall walk no more through the sodden plain
With the faded bents o'erspread,

We shall stand no more by the seething main
While the dark wrack drives o'erhead;

We shall part no more in the wind and the rain,
Where thy last farewell was said;

But perhaps I shall meet thee and know thee again When the sca gives up her dead.

COVENTRY PATMORE.

[ELDEST son of Peter George Patmore; born July 23, 1823, at Woodford in Essex; educated at home by his father, who did all he could to develope in him an ardour for poetry.' He went to Paris and began to write verses in 1839. He published Poems, 1844. From 1846 to 1865 he was an assistant in the Library of the British Museum. Tamerton Church-Tower, 1853; The Betrothal, 1854; The Espousals, 1856; Faithful for Ever, 1860; The Victories of Love, 1863; were instalments of a single narrativepoem, The Angel in the House. Patmore was married in 1847, again in 1865, and a third time in 1881. He settled at Heron's Ghyll, in Sussex, and printed his Odes in 1868. These, much enlarged, form The Unknown Eros, of 1877. His prose essays were published as Principle in Art, 1889; Religio Poetae, 1893; and The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, 1895. He lived in Hastings from 1875 to 1891, when he removed to Lymington, where he died on November 26, 1896.]

When, in 1886, Patmore rightly judged that he had closed his task as a poet, he solemnly recorded that he had

'traversed the ground and reached the end which, in my youth, I saw before me. I have written little, but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity, and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.'

When he wrote these words he had been a practising poet for forty-seven years, but with long intervals of silence and retirement. It was part of Coventry Patmore's intellectual creed to regard the writing of verse as by no means the exclusive or perhaps even main occupation of a poet. Hence he was content to spend months and even years in meditation, during which he filled the cells of his nature with the material for poetry. Between the ages of thirty and forty he composed steadily, though even then not abundantly; while, during all the other years of his life, his actual writing was performed at long intervals, in feverish spurts. This mode of production is worthy of notice in Patmore's case, because of the extraordinary concentration of his thought and will on the vocation