ere dogs for
scorning--
To be sent back when she pleased it and her path lay through the wheat.

XXXVIII.

And thus, morning after morning, spite of vows and spite of sorrow,
Did I follow at her drawing, while the week-days passed along,--
Just to feed the swans this noontide, or to see the fawns to-morrow,
Or to teach the hill-side echo some sweet Tuscan in a song.

XXXIX.

Ay, for sometimes on the hill-side, while we sate down in the gowans,
With the forest green behind us and its shadow cast before,
And the river running under, and across it from the rowans
A brown partridge whirring near us till we felt the air it bore,--

XL.

There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems
Made to Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser, or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch's sonnets--here's the book, the leaf is folded down!

XLI.

Or at times a modern volume, Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie,--
Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep down the
middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

XLII.

Or at times I read there, hoarsely, some new poem of my making:
Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth,
For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking,
And the chariot wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them
forth.

XLIII.

After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging
A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast
She would break out on a sudden in a gush of woodland singing,
Like a child's emotion in a god--a naiad tired of rest.

XLIV.

Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest,
For her looks sing too--she modulates her gestures on the tune,
And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are
finest,
'T is the eyes that shoot out vocal light and seem to swell them on.

XLV.

Then we talked--oh, how we talked! her voice, so cadenced in the
talking,
Made another singing--of the soul! a music without bars:
While the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were
walking,
Brought interposition worthy-sw