With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;
O, make in me those civil wars to cease:
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed;
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;
A rosy garland, and a weary head.
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me
Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see.

SLEEP.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY,

Of all the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward unto souls afar,
Among the Psalmist's music deep,
Now tell me if that any is
For gift or grace surpassing this, -
"He giveth his beloved sleep"?

What would we give to our beloved?
The hero's heart, to be unmoved,
The poet's star-tuned harp, to sweep,
The patriot's voice, to teach and rouse,
The monarch's crown, to light the brows?
"He giveth his beloved sleep."

What do we give to our beloved?
A little faith, all undisproved,

A little dust, to overweep,
And bitter memories, to make

The whole earth blasted for our sake,
"He giveth his beloved sleep."

"Sleep soft, beloved!" we sometimes say, But have no tune to charm away Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep; But never doleful dream again Shall break the happy slumber when "He giveth his beloved sleep."

O earth, so full of dreary noise!
O men, with wailing in your voice!
O delvéd gold the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And "giveth his beloved sleep."

His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still,
Though on its slope men sow and reap;
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
"He giveth his beloved sleep."

For me, my heart, that erst did go
Most like a tired child at a show,

Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,

And lulled with sounds of sweetest melody?

O thou dull god! why liest thou with the vile,
In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch,
A watch-case, or a common 'larum-bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamors in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down,
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

How wonderful is Death! Death and his brother Sleep! One, pale as yonder waning moon, With lips of lurid blue; The other, rosy as the morn When, throned on ocean's wave, It blushes o'er the world: Yet both so passing wonderful!

Hath then the gloomy Power

Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres
Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a heating heart, those azure veins
Which steal like streams along a field of snow,
That lovely outline which is fair

As breathing marble, perish?
Must putrefaction's breath
Leave nothing of this heavenly sight
But loathsomeness and ruin?
Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,
On which the lightest heart might moralize?
Or is it only a sweet slumber
Stealing o'er sensation,

Which the breath of roseate morning
Chaseth into darkness?

Will lanthe wake again,

And give that faithful bosom joy, Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch Light, life, and rapture from her smile?

Yes! she will wake again,

Although her glowing limbs are motionless,
And silent those sweet lips,
Once breathing eloquence
That might have soothed a tiger's rage,
Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.
Her dewy eyes are closed,

And on their lids, whose texture fine

SLEEPLESSNESS.

A FLOCK of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky;

I've thought of all by turns, and still I lie
Sleepless; and soon the small birds' melodies
Must hear, first uttered from my orchard trees,
And the first cuckoo's melancholy cry.

Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away:
Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

SARILLON.

IN the ancient town of Bruges,
In the quaint old Flemish city,
As the evening shades descended,
Low and loud and sweetly blended,
Low at times and loud at times,
And changing like a poet's rhymes,
Rang the beautiful wild chimes
From the Belfry in the market
Of the ancient town of Bruges.

Then, with deep sonorous clangor
Calmly answering their sweet anger,
When the wrangling bells had ended,
Slowly struck the clock eleven,
And, from out the silent heaven,
Silence on the town descended.
Silence, silence everywhere,

On the earth and in the air,

Save that footsteps here and there
Of some burgher home returning,
By the street lamps faintly burning,
For a moment woke the echoes
Of the ancient town of Bruges.

But amid my broken slumbers
Still I heard those magic numbers,
As they loud proclaimed the flight
And stole marches of the night;
Till their chimes in sweet collision
Mingled with each wandering vision,
Mingled with the fortune-telling
Gypsy-bands of dreams and fancies,
Which amid the waste expanses
Of the silent land of trances
Have their solitary dwelling ;
All else seemed asleep in Bruges,
In the quaint old Flemish city.

And I thought how like these chimes
Are the poet's airy rhymes,
All his rhymes and roundelays,
His conceits, and songs, and ditties,
From the belfry of his brain,
Scattered downward, though in vain,
On the roofs and stones of cities!
For by night the drowsy ear
Under its curtains cannot hear,
And by day men go their ways,
Hearing the music as they pass,
But deeming it no more, alas!
Than the hollow sound of brass.

Yet perchance a sleepless wight,
Lodging at some humble inn
In the narrow lanes of life,
When the dusk and hush of night
Shut out the incessant din

Of daylight and its toil and strife,
May listen with a calm delight
To the poet's melodies,

Till he hears, or dreams he hears,
Intermingled with the song,
Thoughts that he has cherished long ;
Hears amid the chime and singing
The bells of his own village ringing,
And wakes, and finds his slumberous eyes
Wet with most delicious tears.

Thus dreamed I, as by night I lay
In Bruges, at the Fleur-de-Blé,
Listening with a wild delight
To the chimes that, through the night,
Rang their changes from the Belfry
Of that quaint old Flemish city.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

CLARENCE. O, I have passed a miserable night!
So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights,
That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
I would not spend another such a night,
Though 't were to buy a world of happy days,
So full of dismal terror was the time!
Methought that I had broken from the Tower,
And was embarked to cross to Burgundy,
And, in my company, my brother Gloster,
Who from my cabin tempted me to walk
Upon the hatches; thence we looked toward
England,

And cited up a thousand heavy times,
During the wars of York and Lancaster,
That had befallen us. As we paced along
Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,
Methought that Gloster stumbled; and, in fall-
ing,
Struck me,

that thought to stay him, overboard, Into the tumbling billows of the main.

O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of water in mine ears!
What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks ;
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scattered in the bottom of the sea :

Some lay in dead men's skulls; and in those holes Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept (As 't were in scorn of eyes) reflecting gems, That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep, And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by. BRAKENBURY. Had you such leisure, in the time of death,

To gaze upon these secrets of the deep?

CLAR. Methought I had; and often did I strive To yield the ghost: but still the envious flood Stopt in my soul, and would not let it forth To seek the empty, vast, and wandering air ; But smothered it within my panting bulk, Which almost burst to belch it in the sea.

BRAK. Awaked you not with this sore agony?
CLAR. No, no, my dream was lengthened after
life;

O, then began the tempest to my soul!
I passed, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
The first that there did greet my stranger soul
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick ;
Who cried aloud, "What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence ?”
And so he vanished: then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair

Dabbled in blood; and he shrieked out aloud,
"Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured
Clarence,

That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury ;
Seize on him, Furies! take him to your torments!"
With that, methought, a legion of foul fiends
Environed me, and howléd in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that, with the very noise,
I trembling waked, and, for a season after,
Could not believe but that I was in hell,
Such terrible impression made my dream.

THE DREAM.

I.

SHAKESPEARE.

OUR life is twofold; sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence : sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,
Like sibyls of the future; they have power,
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not, -what they
will,

they speak

And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows. - Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind? The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep,- for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

II.

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of a mild declivity, the last
As 't were the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs; the hill
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,

Not by the sport of nature, but of man:
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing, the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself, but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful.
And both were young, yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one belovéd face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in hers;
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which colored all his objects; he had ceased
To live within himself: she was his life,
Which terminated all; upon a tone,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,

A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously, his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.
But she in these fond feelings had no share :
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother, - but no more; 't was much,
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Herself the solitary scion left
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him ;

Of a time-honored race. It was a name Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not,

and why?

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