Browning's England

Just for a handful of silver he left us,

Just for a riband to stick in his coat-

Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,

Lost all the others, she lets us devote;

They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,

So much was theirs who so little allowed:

How all our copper had gone for his service!

Rags-were they purple, his heart had been proud!

15 We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,

Made him our pattern to live and to die!

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,

Burns, Shelley, were with us,-they watch from their graves!

He alone breaks from the van and the freeman,

-He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

What's become of Waring

Since he gave us all the slip,

Chose land-travel or seafaring,

Boots and chest or staff and scrip,

Rather than pace up and down

Any longer London town?

Who'd have guessed it from his lip

Or his brow's accustomed bearing,

On the night he thus took ship

Or started landward?-little caring

For us, it seems, who supped together

(Friends of his too, I remember)

And walked home thro' the merry weather,

The snowiest in all December.

I left his arm that night myself

For what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet

Who wrote the book there, on the shelf-

How, forsooth, was I to know it

If Waring meant to glide away

Like a ghost at break of day?

Never looked he half so gay!