r.

We see the flaps of thy large ears
Quick raised to ask which way we go; 50
Crossing the frozen lake, appears
Thy small black figure on the snow!

Nor to us only art thou dear
Who mourn thee in thine English home;
Thou hast thine absent master's deg. tear, 55
Dropt by the far Australian foam.

Thy memory lasts both here and there,
And thou shalt live as long as we.
And after that--thou dost not care!
In us was all the world to thee. 60

Yet, fondly zealous for thy fame,
Even to a date beyond our own
We strive to carry down thy name,
By mounded turf, and graven stone.

We lay thee, close within our reach, 65
Here, where the grass is smooth and warm,
Between the holly and the beech,
Where oft we watch'd thy couchant form,

Asleep, yet lending half an ear
To travellers on the Portsmouth road;-- 70
There build we thee, O guardian dear,
Mark'd with a stone, thy last abode!

Then some, who through this garden pass,
When we too, like thyself, are clay,
Shall see thy grave upon the grass, 75
And stop before the stone, and say:

_People who lived here long ago
Did by this stone, it seems, intend
To name for future times to know
The dachs-hound, Geist, their little friend._ 80

EPILOGUE

TO LESSING'S LAOCOOeN deg.

One morn as through Hyde Park deg. we walk'd, deg.1
My friend and I, by chance we talk'd
Of Lessing's famed Laocooen;
And after we awhile had gone
In Lessing's track, and tried to see 5
What painting is, what poetry--
Diverging to another thought,
"Ah," cries my friend, "but who hath taught
Why music and the other arts
Oftener perform aright their parts 10
Than poetry? why she, than they,
Fewer fine successes can display?

"For 'tis so, surely! Even in Greece,
Where best the poet framed his piece,
Even in that Phoebus-guarded ground deg. deg.15
Pausanias deg. on his travels found deg.16
Good poems, if he look'd, more rare
(Though many) than good statues were--
For these, in truth, were everywhere.
Of bards full many a stroke divine 20
In Dante's, deg. Petrarch'