DAISY. Where the thistle lifts a purple crown And the harebell shakes on the windy hill- The hills look over on the South, And southward dreams the sea; And, with the sea-breeze hand in hand, Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry She listened with big-lipped surprise, She knew not those sweet words she spake, But there's never a bird, so sweet a song Oh, there were flowers in Storrington But the sweetest flower on the Sussex hills Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face! She gave me tokens three : A look, a word of her winsome mouth, And a wild raspberry. A berry red, a guileless look, A still word,—strings of sand! And yet they made my wild, wild heart Fly down to her little hand. For standing artless as the air, And candid as the skies, She took the berries with her hand, The fairest things have fleetest end: She looked a little wistfully, Then went her sunshine way :— The sea's eye had a mist on it, She went her unremembering way, The pang of all the partings gone, She left me marvelling while my soul Still, still I seemed to see her, still And take the berries with her hand, Nothing begins, and nothing ends, LOVE DECLARED. I looked, she drooped, and neither spoke, and cold That falling kiss Touching long-laid expectance, all went up Suddenly into passion; yea, the night Caught, blazed, and wrapt us round in vibrant fire. Time's beating wing subsided, and the winds Caught up their breathing, and the world's great pulse This moment is a statue unto Love Carved from a fair white silence. Lo, he stands Within us-are we not one now, one, one roof, His roof, and the partition of weak flesh Gone down before him, and no more, for ever?— Poised in our quiet being; only, only Within our shaken hearts the air of passion, And whirs round his enchanted movelessness. A film of trance between two strivings! Lo, It bursts; yet dream's snapped links cling round the limbs Of waking like a running evening stream : Which no man hears, or sees, or knows to run, Our eyes' sweet trouble were hid, save that the love FREDERIC HERBERT TRENCH THE incomparable legend of Deirdre may, for aught I know, have found its predestined poet in the Irish tongue; but in English it as yet awaits him. It cannot, surely, have long to wait; indeed, one rather wonders that there should not be a rush for the usufruct of so glorious a theme. Perhaps Mr. Herbert Trench may be held to have "staked out his claim" in Deirdre Wed. His poem cannot be regarded as more than a preliminary study for the epic yet to be; but if he himself regards it in that lighta point on which I have no information-one must gladly admit it to be a preliminary study of very high promise. 6 "This episode of thirty hours," says Mr. Trench, "does not occur in any of the versions of the famous Tragical Tale of the Sons of Usnach.'" In other words, the episode is a thing of his own invention, outside and apart from the actual legend. In just such a fashion would a poet, in doubt as to the best form in which to cast an ambitious work, make his experimental essays. He would not care to prove his tools on any portion of his actual theme, but would rather choose for that purpose a piece of similar material, which would form no necessary part of the ultimate fabric. Mr. Trench is even at some pains, as it seems to me, to emphasise the tentative nature of his present effort. It is difficult to account otherwise for the elaborate and quite disproportionate machinery which he applies to the narration |