swells
With sound of its own hungry quest;
Earth has to fill her empty wells,
And speed the service of the nest;
The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,
That haunts the farmer's look abroad,
Who sees what tomb a white night built,
Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.
For iron Winter held her firm;
Across her sky he laid his hand;
And bird he starved, he stiffened worm;
A sightless heaven, a shaven land.
Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep,
The bitten buds dared not unfold:
We raced on roads and ice to keep
Thought of the girl we love from cold.

But now the North wind ceases,
The warm South-west awakes,
The heavens are out in fleeces,
And earth's green banner shakes.

THE LABOURER

For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory that
follows
When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he has
done.
But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer's
crown is Apollo's,
While stands he yet in his grime and sweat--to wrestle for fruits of
the Sun.

Can an enemy wither his cheer? Not you, ye fair yellow-flowering
ladies,
Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, and
clog.
'Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soul
to their Hades,
And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay of
the Dog.

Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving new
fashions:
The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs lured
to run in a stream:
He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason to
swallow the passions,
Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a trouble extreme!

Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer's resolute hope: that
by him shall be written,
To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak from the strong
made just:
That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thrice
vitalised Britain,
Ashine with the light of the doing of right: at the gates of the
Future in trust.

FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE

Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
When