class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Two Leaders

Victor Hugo in 1877

Child's Song

Triads

Four Songs of Four Seasons:—
I. Winter in Northumberland
II. Spring in Tuscany
III. Summer in Auvergne
IV. Autumn in Cornwall

The White Czar

Rizpah

To Louis Kossuth

Translations from the French of Villon:—
The Complaint of the Fair Armouress
A Double Ballad of Good Counsel
Fragment on Death
Ballad of the Lords of Old Time
Ballad of the Women of Paris
Ballad written for a Bridegroom
Ballad against the Enemies of France
The Dispute of the Heart and Body of François Villon
Epistle in form of a Ballad to his Friends
The Epitaph in form of a Ballad

From Victor Hugo

Nocturne

Théophile Gautier

Ode

In Obitom Theophili Poetæ

Ad Catullum

Dedication, 1878

POEMS AND BALLADS

SECOND SERIES

INSCRIBED

TO

RICHARD F. BURTON

IN REDEMPTION OF AN OLD PLEDGE AND IN RECOGNITION OF A FRIENDSHIP WHICH I MUST ALWAYS COUNT AMONG THE HIGHEST HONOURS OF MY LIFE

THE LAST ORACLE

(A.D. 361)

Years have risen and fallen in darkness or in twilight,
   Ages waxed and waned that knew not thee nor thine,
While the world sought light by night and sought not thy light,
   Since the sad last pilgrim left thy dark mid shrine.
Dark the shrine and dumb the fount of song thence welling,
   Save for words more sad than tears of blood, that said:
Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling,
   And the watersprings that spake are quenched and dead.
Not a cell is left the God, no roof, no cover
   In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.
And the great king's high sad heart, thy true last lover,
   Felt thine answer pierce and cleave it to the core.
         And he bowed down his hopeless head
            In the drift of the wild world's tide,
         And dying, Thou hast conquered, he said,
            Galilean; he said it, and died.
         And the world that was thine and was ours
         When the Graces took hands with the Hours
         Grew cold as a winter wave
         In the wind from a wide-mouthed grave,
         As a gulf wide open to swallow