"Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, Give the chalk here quick, thus the line should go! Another smile? If you would sit thus by me every night I should work better, do you comprehend? Oft at nights eyes tired out, That cousin here again? he waits outside? Must see you-you, and not with me? Those loans? More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that ? Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend? While hand and eye and something of a heart Are left to me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit The grey remainder of the evening out, Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly How I could paint, were I but back in France, side at my Finish the portrait out of hand-there, there, Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. I took his coin, was tempted and complied, How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot. They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died : And I have laboured somewhat in my time No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes, Meted on each side by the angel's reed Again the cousin's whistle! Go, my love. SAUL. I. Said Abner, "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak, Kiss my cheek, wish me well!" and did kiss his cheek. Then I wished it, And he, "Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent, Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent Thou return with the joyful assurance the king liveth yet, Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet. For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days, Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer or of praise, To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife, And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life. II. "Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child, with His dew On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat Were now raging to torture the desert!" III. Then I, as was meet, Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my feet, And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was unlooped; I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped; Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone, That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I prayed, And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid, But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied. At the first I saw nought but the blackness; but soon I descried A something more black than the blackness-the vast, the upright Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all: Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof, showed Saul. |