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THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE

(Student's Love-song)

ONCE more the cauldron of the sun
Smears the bookcase with winy red,
And here my page is, and there my bed,
And the apple-tree shadows travel along.
Soon their intangible track will be run,
And dusk grow strong
And they be fled.

Yes

now the boiling ball is gone.
And I have wasted another day.
But wasted-wasted, do I say?
Is it a waste to have imaged one
Beyond the hills there, who, anon,
My great deeds done,
Will be mine alway?

"WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE '

WHEN I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,

The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,

All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse

With magic in my eyes!

AT THE WORD "FAREWELL"

SHE looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed,
In the dim of dawn.

The candles alight in the room
For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal.

The hour itself was a ghost,

And it seemed to me then

As of chances the chance furthermost
I should see her again.

I beheld not where all was so fleet

That a Plan of the past

Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet

Was accomplished at last.

No prelude did I there perceive

To a drama at all,

Or foreshadow what fortune might weave

From beginnings so small.

AT THE WORD

FAREWELL

19

But I rose as if quicked by a spur

I was bound to obey,

And stepped through the casement to her

Still alone in the gray.

“I am leaving you.

As I followed her on

Farewell! I said

By an alley bare boughs overspread :

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I soon must be gone!'

Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,

-But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.

DITTY

(E. L. G.)

BENEATH a knap where flown
Nestlings play,

Within walls of weathered stone,
Far away

From the files of formal houses,
By the bough the firstling browses,
Lives a Sweet: no merchants meet,
No man barters, no man sells
Where she dwells.

Upon that fabric fair

"Here is she!"

Seems written everywhere

Unto me.

But to friends and nodding neighbours,
Fellow-wights in lot and labours,

Who descry the times as I,
No such lucid legend tells
Where she dwells.

Should I lapse to what I was
Ere we met;

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