you'd tried me with caprice, Did my welcome, did my gladness ever fail? To-day not loud is my lamenting:      Do not chide me; it shall cease:      Could I think of vanished love without a wail? Elsewhere, you lightly say, are blooming All the graces I desire:      Thus you goad me to the treason of content:      If ever, when your brow is glooming, Softer faces I admire, Then your lightnings make me tremble and repent. Grant this: whatever else beguileth Restless dreaming, drowsy toil, As a plaything, as a windfall, let me hail it. Believe: the brightest one that smileth To your beaming is a foil, To the splendour breaking from you, though you veil it. 

  

       PREPARATION     

      Too weak am I to pray, as some have prayed, That love might hurry straightway out of mind, And leave an ever-vacant waste behind. I thank thee rather, that through every grade Of less and less affection we decline, As month by month thy strong importunate fate Thrusts back my claims, and draws thee toward the great, And shares amongst a hundred what was mine. Proud heroes ask to perish in high noon:      I'd have refractions of the fallen day,      And heavings when the gale hath flown away, And this slow disenchantment: since too soon, Too surely, comes the death of my poor heart, Be it inured to pain, in mercy, ere we part. 

  

       DETERIORA     

      One year I lived in high romance, A soul ennobled by the grace Of one whose very frowns enhance The regal lustre of the face, And in the magic of a smile I dwelt as in Calypso's isle. One year, a narrow line of blue, With clouds both ways awhile held back:      And dull the vault that line goes through, And frequent now the crossing rack; And who shall pierce the upper sky, And count the spheres? Not I, not I! Sweet year, it was not hope you brought, Nor after toil and storm repose, But a fresh growth of tender thought, And all of love my spirit knows. You let my lifetime pause, and bade The noontide dial cast no shade. If fate and nature screen from me The sovran front I bowed before, And set the glorious creature free, Whom I would clasp, detain, adore; If I forego that strange delight, Must all be lost? Not quite, not quite. Die, little Love, without complaint, Whom Honour standeth by to 

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