De Gustibus---

I.

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,    (If our loves remain)    In an English lane,

By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.

Hark, those two in the hazel coppice—-A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,    Making love, say,—-    The happier they!

Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,

And let them pass, as they will too soon,    With the bean-flowers' boon,    And the blackbird's tune,    And May, and June!

II.

What I love best in all the

Is a castle, precipice-encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved

Or look for me, old fellow of mine,(If I get my head from out the mouthO' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,

And come again to the land of lands)—-In a sea-side house to the farther South,

Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,

And one sharp tree—-'tis a cypress—-stands,

By the many hundred years red-rusted,

Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,

My sentinel to guard the

To the water's edge.

For, what

Before the house, but the great

Blue breadth of sea without a break?

While, in the house, for ever

Some fragment of the frescoed walls,

From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.

A girl bare-footed brings, and

Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,

And says there's news to-day—-the

Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,

Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:—-She hopes they have not caught the felons.

Italy, my Italy!

Queen Mary's saying serves for me—-    (When fortune's malice    Lost her—-Calais)—-Open my heart and you will

Graved inside of it, ``Italy.''Such lovers old are I and she:

So it always was, so shall ever be!