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L.

All beauty and all life he was to her;

She questioned not his love, she only knew

That she loved him, and not a pulse could stir

In her whole frame but quivered through and through

With this glad thought, and was a minister

To do him fealty and service true,

Like golden ripples hasting to the land

To wreck their freight of sunshine on the strand.

LI.

O dewy dawn of love! O hopes that are

Hung high, like the cliff-swallow's perilous nest,

Most like to fall when fullest, and that jár

With every heavier billow! O unrest

Than balmiest deeps of quiet sweeter far!

How did ye triumph now in Margaret's breast, Making it readier to shrink and start

Than the pond-lily's golden quivering heart!

LII.

Here let us pause: O, would the soul might ever

Achieve its immortality in youth,

When nothing yet hath damped its high endeavour After the starry energy of truth!

Here let us pause, and for a moment sever

This gleam of sunshine from the days unruth

That sometime come to all, for it is good

To lengthen to the last a sunny mood.

LIII.

Hope skims o'er life as we may sometimes see
A butterfly, whose home is in the flowers,
Blown outward far over the moaning sea,
Remembering in vain its odorous bowers;

It flutters o'er the drear immensity

To sink ere long: there are not many hours
Ere the heart wonders at the simple hope
That danced so gayly forth with fate to cope.

LIV.

But Faith comes ever after Hope is fled,

Hope's ghost, with sadder yet with fairer face,
To tell us that she is but seeming dead;
That earth is but her body's burial-place,

Whence flowers shall spring, on lowly hearts to shed
A fragrant prophecy of heaven's grace,
And that we truly could not see her, even,
Till she had flitted to her home in heaven.

A LEGEND OF BRITTANY.

PART SECOND.

I.

As one who, from the sunshine and the green,

Enters the solid darkness of a cave,

Nor knows what precipice or pit unseen

May yawn before him with its sudden grave,

And, with hushed breath, doth often forward lean, Deeming he hears the plashing of a wave

Dimly below, or feels a damper air

From out some dreary chasm, he knows not where ;

II.

So, from the sunshine and the green of love,
We enter on our story's darker part;

And, though the horror of it well may move
An impulse of repugnance in the heart,
Yet let us think, that, as there 's naught above
The all-embracing atmosphere of Art,

So also there is naught that falls below

Her generous reach, though grimed with guilt and woe.

III.

Her fittest triumph is to show that good

Lurks in the heart of evil evermore,

That love, though scorned, and outcast, and withstood,
Can without end forgive, and yet have store;
God's love and man's are of the self-same blood,
And He can see that always at the door

Of foulest hearts the angel-nature yet

Knocks to return and cancel all its debt.

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