infinite love,
Infinite love and sorrow,
Prays for them there on high;--
Who has most need of her prayers,--to-morrow
Shall tell them,--they or I?

Up in the hills together
We loved, where the world seemed true;
Our world of the whin and heather,
Our skies of a nearer blue,
A blue from which one borrows
A faith that helps one die--
O Mother, sweet Mother of Sorrows,
None needs such more than I!

We lived, we loved unwedded--
Love's sin and its shame that slays!--
No ill of the year we dreaded,
No day of its coming days;
Its coming days, their many
Trials by morn and night,
And I know no land, not any,
Where love's lilies grow so white!

Was he false to me, my Mother!
Or I to him, my God!--
Who gave thee right, O brother!
To take God's right and rod!
God's rod of avenging morrows,
And the life here in my side!
O Mother, God's Mother of Sorrows,
For both I would have died!

By the wall of the Chantry kneeling,
I pray and the organ rings,
"_Gloria! gloria!_" pealing,
"_Sancta Maria_" sings!
They will find us dead to-morrow
By the wall of their nunnery,
O Mother, sweet Mother of Sorrow!
His unborn babe and me.

THE OLD INN.

1.

Red-winding from the sleepy town,
One takes the lone, forgotten lane
Straight through the hills. A brush-bird brown
Bubbles in thorn-flowers sweet with rain;
Light shivers sink the gleaming grain;
The cautious drip of higher leaves
The lower dips that drip again.--
Above the tangled tops it heaves
Its gables and its haunted eaves.

2.

One creeper, gnarled to bloomlessness,
O'er-forests all its eastern wall;
The sighing cedars rake and press
Dark boughs along the panes they sprawl;
While, where the sun beats, breaks a drawl
Of hiving wasps; one bushy bee,
Gold-dusty, hurls along the hall
To hum into a crack.--To me
The shadows seem too scared to flee.

3.

Of ragged chimneys martins make
Huge pipes of music; twittering here
Build, breed, and roost.--My footfalls wake
Strange stealing echoes, till I fear
I'll meet my pale self coming near;
My phantom face as in a glass;
Or one men murdered, buried--where?
Dim in gray, stealthy glimmer,