pring last year.

BEWITCHED

(_On a Devon Moor_)

Why do I babble of bitter chills--
And icy trees--and snowy fallows?
Why do I shudder as twilight spills
A ghostly gray and the bent moon sallows
The moor with her wicked flame?
Why do the gibbering croons of the hag
In her hut by the wood
Go muttering, muttering in my blood--
Till the hoot of an owl
On the snag of a tomb
Breaks out of the gloom
Like the wail of a witch's name?

Ugh, it is drawing my feet away--
The road's gone! the moonlet's sunken!
What shall I do if it comes to fray
With fiends invisible, wild and drunken--
Fiends on a churchless fell!
Ha, is it cracking of ice in the bog
That is clutching my throat,
Or devils gnawing the widow's shoat?
By the Cross of the Christ,
There's a fog that is black
As--U-r-r!--at my back!--
They are dragging me ... down to ... hell!

QUARREL

And is it so
That two who stand
Heart closed in heart,
Hand knit to hand,
Can let love go
Asunder, so?
Speak hard--not understand?

That one asks much?
One gives too small?
And so is lost,
It may be--All?
That for a touch
Of pride we such
A heaven can let fall?

No!--But to Fate
Say with me, "Go:
Death may bring dross
But this I know;
_Love can abate
Life's harshest hate,
So loving I bend low._"

OF THE FLESH

(_At Monte Carlo_)

We met upon the street;
Quick passion sprung into the eye of each;
No dilettante heat!
For though I do not love her now, beseech
You, signor, do you think
We could face so in any spot, nor fear
To leap the fatal brink
Into each other's arms--that, once a-near,
Hell's self could make us shrink?

No, no! Such love as ours
Stabbed peace heart-deep and burnt the flesh to mad.
It scorned the simple powers
Of sympathy and mild repose, and had
One thirst alone--to hold
Each other mouth to still unsated mouth
Until, perchance, the cold
And damp of death should end some night its drouth.

But only day would come,
Unlock our arms and show us duty's eye
Calm, pale, and sternly dumb.
And so we'd swear never to kiss or sigh
Again--for well we knew
God grants such boons only to man and wife.
But night distilled the dew
Of loneliness--and so, once more, that life.

And how was the spell burst?
Each long embrace seemed sw