Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
E. Robert Bulwer, Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith) (18311891)Extracts from The Wanderer: Spring and Winter
Felt not love, to speak of love so?
If he still unmoved must be,
Was it nobly sought to move so?
Pluck the flower, but not to wear it—
Spurn it from him, yet not spare it?
With such meaning in his tone,
Adding ever that her hair
Had the same tinge as my own?
Pluck my life up, root and bloom,
To make garlands for her tomb!
Lack’d the lucid blush divine
Of that rose each whisper light
Of his praises waked in mine;
But ’twas just that he loved then
More than he can love again.
Wherefore praise me, speaking low?
Use my face just to remind him
How no face could please him now?
Why, if loving could not move him,
Did he teach me still to love him?
He had suffer’d much of yore:
But a fair face, to his eyes now,
Was a fair face, and no more.
Yet the anguish and the bliss,
And the dream too, had been his.”
For the commonplaces spoken!
Looks whose meaning seem’d to render
Help to words when speech came broken!
Why so late in July moonlight
Just to say what ’s said by noonlight?
Keeping something in his smile
That changed all my youth to sadness,
He still smiling all the while?
Since, when so my youth was over,
He said “Seek some younger lover!”
Are astir as heretofore,
And the apple-blossom blushes
As of old about the door.
Doth he taste a finer bliss,
I must wonder, in all this,
By the usage of my youth?
I can feel my forehead crost
By the wrinkle’s fretful tooth,
While the grey grows in my hair,
And the cold creeps everywhere.