d mists
Of driving vermeil-rain; and, as he lists,
The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers,
A glorious wanton;--all the wrecks in showers
Crowd down upon a stream, and jostling thick
With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick
On.tangled shoals that bar the brook a crowd
Of filmy globes and rosy floating cloud:
So those Mermaidens crowded to my rock.

* * * * *

But most in a half-circle watch'd the sun;
And a sweet sadness dwelt on every one;
I knew not why,--but know that sadness dwells
On Mermaids--whether that they ring the knells
Of seamen whelm'd in chasms of the mid-main,
As poets sing; or that it is a pain
To know the dusk depths of the ponderous sea,
The miles profound of solid green, and be
With loath'd cold fishes, far from man--or what;--
I know the sadness but the cause know not.
Then they, thus ranged, gan make full plaintively
A piteous Siren sweetness on the sea,
Withouten instrument, or conch, or bell,
Or stretch'd chords tuneable on turtle's shell;
Only with utterance of sweet breath they sung
An antique chaunt and in an unknown tongue.
Now melting upward through the sloping scale
Swell'd the sweet strain to a melodious wail;
Now ringing clarion-clear to whence it rose
Slumber'd at last in one sweet, deep, heart-broken close.

_1862-1868_ After the relics of his school-poems follow the
poems written when an undergraduate at Oxford, of which
there are four in this book--Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 52, all
dating about 1866. Of this period some ten or twelve
autograph poems exist, the most successful being religious
verses worked in Geo. Herbert's manner, and these, I think,
have been printed: there are two sonnets in Italian form and
Shakespearian mood (refused by 'Cornhill Magazine'); the
rest are attempts at lyrical poems, mostly sentimental
aspects of death: one of them 'Winter with the Gulf-stream'
was published in 'Once a Week', and reprinted at least in
part in some magazine: the autograph copy is dated Aug. 1871,
but G. M. H. told me that he wrote it when he was at school;
whence I guess that he altered it too much to allow of its
early dating. The following is a specimen of his signature
at this date.

Gerard M. Hopkins.
July 24, 1866.

Transcriber's note: This signature and date is displayed as a
handwritten image in the original.

_1868-1875_ After these last-mentioned poems there is a gap of
Silence which may be accounted for in his own words from a
letter to R. W. D. Oct. 5, '78: 'What