Love in the ways of the tune.

Softer than seasons of sleep:
Dearer than life at its best!
Give her a ballad to keep,
Wove of the passionate West:
Give it and say of the hours--
"Haunted and hallowed of thee,
Flower-like woman of flowers,
What shall the end of them be?"

You that have loved her so much,
Loved her asleep and awake,
Trembled because of her touch,
What have you said for her sake?
Far in the falls of the day,
Down in the meadows of myrrh,
What has she left you to say
Filled with the beauty of her?

Take her the best of your thoughts,
Let them be gentle and grave,
Say, "I have come to thy courts,
Maiden, with all that I have."
So she may turn with her sweet
Face to your love and to you,
Learning the way to repeat
Words that are brighter than dew.

Charles Harpur

Where Harpur lies, the rainy streams,
And wet hill-heads, and hollows weeping,
Are swift with wind, and white with gleams,
And hoarse with sounds of storms unsleeping.

Fit grave it is for one whose song
Was tuned by tones he caught from torrents,
And filled with mountain breaths, and strong,
Wild notes of falling forest currents.

So let him sleep, the rugged hymns
And broken lights of woods above him!
And let me sing how sorrow dims
The eyes of those that used to love him.

As April in the wilted wold
Turns faded eyes on splendours waning,
What time the latter leaves are old,
And ruin strikes the strays remaining;

So we that knew this singer dead,
Whose hands attuned the harp Australian,
May set the face and bow the head,
And mourn his fate and fortunes alien.

The burden of a perished faith
Went sighing through his speech of sweetness,
With human hints of time and death,
And subtle notes of incompleteness.

But when the fiery power of youth
Had passed away and left him nameless,
Serene as light, and strong as truth,
He lived his life, untired and tameless.

And, far and free, this man of men,
With wintry hair and wasted feature,
Had fellowship with gorge and glen,
And learned the loves and runes of Nature.

Strange words of wind, and rhymes of rain,
And whispers from the inland fountains
Are mingled, in his various strain,
With leafy breaths of piny mountains.

But as the undercurren