A Salutation

HIGH-hearted Surrey! I do love your ways,

Venturous, frank, romantic, vehement,

All with inviolate honor sealed and blent,

To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier-bays:

I love your youth, your friendships, whims, and frays;

Your strict, sweet verse, with its imperious bent,

Heard as in dreams from some old harper's tent,

And stirring in the listener's brain for days.

Good father-poet! if to-night there be

At Framlingham none save the north-wind's sighs,

No guard but moonlight's crossed and trailing spears,

Smile yet upon the pilgrim named like me,

Close at your gates, whose fond and weary eyes

Sought not one other down three hundred years!

Louise Imogen Guiney

Open, Time

OPEN, Time, and let him pass

Shortly where his feet would be!

Like a leaf at Michaelmas

Swooning from the tree,

Ere its hour the manly mind

Trembles in a sure decrease,

Nor the body now can find

Any hold on peace.

Take him, weak and overworn;

Fold about his dying dream

Boyhood, and the April morn,

And the rolling stream:

Weather on a sunny ridge,

Showery weather, far from here;

Under some deep-ivied bridge,

Water rushing clear:

Water quick to cross and part,

(Golden light on silver sound),

Weather that was next his heart

All the world around!

Soon upon his vision break

These, in their remembered blue;

He shall toil no more, but wake

Young, in air he knew.

He has done with roofs and men.

Open, Time, and let him pass,

Vague and innocent again,

Into country grass.

Louise Imogen Guiney

The Lights of London

THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot

Far down into the valley's cold extreme,

Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream

Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.

The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot

Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,

From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam,

London, one moment fallen and forgot.

Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright

Prick door and window; all her streets obscure

Sparkle and swarm with nothing true or sure,

Full as a marsh of mist and winking light;

Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure

Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.

Louise Imogen Guiney

In the Reading Room of the British Museum

PRAISED be the moon of books! that doth above

A world of men, the fallen Past behold,

And fill the spaces else so void and cold

To make a very heaven again thereof;

As when the sun is set behind a grove,

And faintly unto nether ether rolled,

All night his whiter image and his mould

Grows beautiful with looking on her love.

Thou therefore, moon of so divine a ray,

Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!

Feebly along a venerable way

They climb the infinite, or perish quite;

Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,

While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

Louise Imogen Guiney

Sunday Chimes in the City

ACROSS the bridge, where in the morning blow

The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain

Homeward to drag the balck sea-goer's chain,

And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;

Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,

Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:

>From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain,

Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.

Forbid not these! Tho' no man heed, they shower

A subtle beauty on the empty hour,

>From all their dark throats aching and outblown;

Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,

Like the last gull that up a naked coast

Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.

Louise Imogen Guiney