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HAWTHORN TIDE.

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Dawn is alive in the world, and the darkness of heaven and of earth

Subsides in the light of a smile more sweet than the loud noon's mirth.

Spring lives as a babe lives, glad and divine as the sun, and

unsure

If aught so divine and so glad may be worshipped and loved and endure.

A soft green glory suffuses the love-lit earth with delight, And the face of the noon is fair as the face of the star-clothed

night.

Earth knows not and doubts not at heart of the glories again

to be;

Sleep doubts not and dreams not how sweet shall the waking beyond her be.

A whole white world of revival awaits May's whisper awhile, Abides and exults in the bud as a soft hushed laugh in a smile.

As a maid's mouth laughing with love and subdued for the love's sake, May

Shines and withholds for a little the word she revives to say.

When the clouds and the winds and the sunbeams are warring and strengthening with joy that they live,

Spring, from reluctance enkindled to rapture, from slumber to strife,

Stirs, and repents, and is winter, and weeps, and awakes as the frosts forgive,

And the dark chill death of the woodland is troubled, and dies into life.

And the honey of heaven, of the hives whence night feeds full on the springtide's breath,

Fills fuller the lips of the lustrous air with delight in the dawn;

Each blossom enkindling with love that is life and subsides with a smile into death

Arises and lightens and sets as a star from her sphere withdrawn.

Not sleep, in the rapture of radiant dreams, when sundawn

smiles on the night,

Shews earth so sweet with a splendor and fragrance of life that is love;

Each blade of the glad live grass, each bud that receives or

rejects the light,

Salutes and responds to the marvel of Maytime around and above.

Joy gives thanks for the sight and the savor of heaven, and is

humbled

With awe that exults in thanksgiving; the towers of the

flowers of the trees

Shine sweeter than snows that the hand of the season has melted and crumbled,

And fair as the foam that is lesser of life than the loveliest of these.

But the sense of a life more lustrous with joy and enkindled

of glory

Than man's was ever or may be, and briefer than joys most

brief,

Bids man's heart bend and adore, be the man's head golden

or hoary,

As it leapt but a breath's time since and saluted the flower and the leaf.

The rapture that springs into love at the sight of the world's

exultation

Takes not a sense of rebuke from the sense of triumphant

awe;

But the spirit that quickens the body fulfils it with mute adoration,

And the knees would fain bow down as the eyes that rejoiced and saw.

II.

Fair and sublime as the face of the dawn is the splendor of May,

But the sky's and the sea's joy fades not as earth's pride

passes away.

Yet hardly the sun's first lightning or laughter of love on the

sea

So humbles the heart into worship that knows not or doubts if it be

As the first full glory beholden again of the life new-born
That hails and applauds with inaudible music the season of

morn.

A day's length since, and it was not; a night's length more, and the sun

Salutes and enkindles a world of delight as a strange world

won.

A new life answers and thrills to the kiss of the young strong

year,

And the glory we see is as music we hear not, and dream that we hear.

From blossom to blossom the live tune kindles, from tree to

tree,

And we know not indeed if we hear not the song of the life

we see.

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For the first blithe day that beholds it and worships and cherishes cannot but sing

With a louder and lustier delight in the sun and the sunlit earth

Than the joy of the days that beheld but the soft green dawn of the slow faint spring

Glad and afraid to be glad, and subdued in a shamefast mirth.

When the first bright knoll of the woodland world laughs out into fragrant light,

The year's heart changes and quickens with sense of delight in desire,

And the kindling desire is one with thanksgiving for utter fruition of sight,

For sight and for sense of a world that the sun finds meet

for his lyre.

Music made of the morning that smites from the chords of the mute world song

Trembles and quickens and lightens, unfelt, unbeholden, un

heard,

From blossom on blossom that climbs and exults in the strength of the sun grown strong,

And answers the word of the wind of the spring with the sun's own word.

Hard on the skirt of the deep soft copses that spring refashions,

Triumphs and towers to the height of the crown of a wildwood tree

One royal hawthorn, sublime and serene as the joy that impassions

Awe that exults in thanksgiving for sight of the grace we

see,

The grace that is given of a god that abides for a season,

mysterious

And merciful, fervent and fugitive, seen and unknown and adored;

His presence is felt in the light and the fragrance elate and

imperious,

His laugh and his breath in the blossom are love's, the beloved soul's lord.

For surely the soul if it loves is beloved of the god as a lover Whose love is not all unaccepted, a worship not utterly vain; Too full, too deep is the joy that revives for the soul to re

cover

Yearly, beholden of hope and of memory in sunshine and rain.

III.

Wonder and love stand silent, and stricken at heart and stilled. But yet is the cup of delight and of worship unpledged and

unfilled,

A hand's breadth hence leaps up, laughs out as an angel

crowned

A strong full fountain of flowers overflowing above and around.

The boughs and the blossoms in triumph salute with adoring

mirth

The womb that bare them, the glad green mother, the sunbright earth.

Downward sweeping, as song subsides into silence, none

May hear what sound is the word's they speak to the brooding

sun.

None that hearken may hear; man may but pass and adore, And humble his heart in thanksgiving for joy that is now no

more.

And sudden, afront and ahead of him, joy is alive and aflame On the shrine whose incense is given of the godhead, again the

same.

Pale and pure as a maiden secluded in secret and cherished with fear,

One sweet glad hawthorn smiles as it shrinks under shelter, screened

By two strong brethren whose bounteous blossom outsoars it, year after year,

While earth still cleaves to the live spring's breast as a babe unweaned.

Never was amaranth fairer in fields where heroes of old found

rest,

Never was asphodel sweeter; but here they endure not long, Though ever the sight that salutes them again and adores them awhile is blest,

And the heart is a hymn, and the sense is a soul, and the soul is a song.

Alone on a dyke's trenched edge, and afar from the blossom

ing wildwood's verge,

Laughs and lightens a sister, triumphant in love-lit pride; Clothed round with the sun, and inviolate; her blossoms exult

as the springtide surge,

When the wind and the dawn enkindle the snows of the shoreward tide.

Hardly the worship of old that rejoiced as it knelt in the vision

Shown of the God new-born whose breath is the spirit of

spring

Hailed ever with love more strong and defiant of death's deri

sion

A joy more perfect than here we mourn for as May takes wing.

Time gives it and takes it again and restores it; the glory,

the wonder,

The triumph of lustrous blossom that makes of the steep sweet bank

One visible marvel of music inaudible, over and under,

Attuned as in heaven, pass hence and return for the sun to thank,

The stars and the sun give thanks for the glory bestowed and beholden,

For the gladness they give and rejoice in, the night and the dawn and the day;

But nought they behold when the world is aflower and the season is golden

Makes answer as meet and as sweet as the flower that itself

is May.

The Athenaeum.

A. C. Swinburne.

THE ORNITHOLOGY OF TENNYSON.

Readers of Tennyson must have observed that the poet was an ardent bird-lover; but the completeness of his acquaintance with bird-life is recognized perhaps only by the few. In these days of "higher education" poets and writers have to beware of small inaccuracies,-neither poetic license nor imagination's lofty flight will serve as a safeguard from the hawk-eyed modern critic who goes about seeking whom he may detect. To-day Wolfe would scarcely have ventured to introduce his

Struggling moonbeam's misty light.

in face of the fact that Mr. Nasmyth, with incisive scientific accuracy, informs us on the authority of that unimpeachable witness, the Nautical Almanac, that upon January 16th, 1809, the moon was scarcely a day old and practically invisible! It is easy to err; perhaps after all Keats's nightingale was only a humble sedge-warbler; most nightingales are. But in Tennyson's ornithology no flaws can be detected. He reveals in a hundred delicate touches his knowledge of bird-life, his full acquaintance with all those points which Seebohm summarizes in the pref

ace to his "History of British Birds:" -"The habits of the bird during the breeding season, at the two periods of migration and in winter; its mode of flight and of progression on the ground, in the trees, or on the water; its song and its various call and alarm notes; its food and its mode of procuring it at different seasons of the year; its migrations, the dates of arrival and departure, the routes it chooses, and the winter quarters it selects; and above all, every particular respecting its breeding, when it begins to build, how many broods it rears in the season, the place it selects in which to build its nest, the material it uses for the purpose, the number of eggs it lays, the variation in their color, size and shape, -all these particulars are the real history of a bird."

The poet falls into no common errors, -for him the swallow and the martin are distinct. Twice the situation in which the latter build their nests is referred to:

Roof-haunting martins warm their eggs,

and

The martin-haunted eaves.

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