The Project Gutenberg eBook, Hawthorn and Lavender, by William Ernest
Henley

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Title: Hawthorn and Lavender
with Other Verses

Author: William Ernest Henley

Release Date: June 1, 2007 [eBook #21662]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAWTHORN AND LAVENDER***

Transcribed from the 1901 David Nutt edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

HAWTHORN
AND LAVENDER

_With Other Verses_, _by_
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

_O_, _how shall summer's honey breath hold out_
_Against the wrackful siege of battering days_?

SHAKESPEARE

LONDON
_Published by DAVID NUTT_
at the Sign of the Phoenix
IN LONG ACRE
1901

_First Edition printed October_ 1901
_Second Edition printed November_ 1901

Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty

Dedication

_Ask me not how they came_,
_These songs of love and death_,
_These dreams of a futile stage_,
_These thumb-nails seen in the street_:
_Ask me not how nor why_,
_But take them for your own_,
_Dear Wife of twenty years_,
_Knowing_--_O_, _who so well_?--
_You it was made the man_
_That made these songs of love_,
_Death_, _and the trivial rest_:
_So that_, _your love elsewhere_,
_These songs_, _or bad or good_--
_How should they ever have been_?

WORTHING, _July_ 31, 1901.

PROLOGUE

These to the glory and praise of the green land
That bred my women, and that holds my dead,
_ENGLAND_, and with her the strong broods that stand
Wherever her fighting lines are thrust or spread!
They call us proud?--Look at our English Rose!
Shedders of blood?--Where hath our own been spared?
Shopkeepers?--Our accompt the high _GOD_ knows.
Close?--In our bounty half the world hath shared.
They hate us, and they envy? Envy and hate
Should drive them to the _PIT'S_ edge?--Be it so!
That race is damned which misesteems its fate;
And this, in _GOD'S_ good time, they all shall know,
And know you too, you good green _ENGLAND_, then--
Mother of mothering girls and governing men!

1. HAWTHORN AND LAVENDER

ENVOY

_My songs were once of the sunrise_:
_They sh