Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/208

170 Who struck, in heat, his child he loved so well,

And his child's reason flickered, and did die.

Painted (he willed it) in the gallery

They hang; the picture doth the story tell.

Behold the stern, mailed father, staff in hand!

The little fair-haired son, with vacant gaze,

Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are!

Methinks the woe, which made that father stand

Baring his dumb remorse to future days,

Was woe than Byron's woe more tragic far.

RACHEL.

Paris all looked hot and like to fade;

Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries,

Sere with September, drooped the chestnut-trees;

'Twas dawn, a brougham rolled through the streets, and made

Halt at the white and silent colonnade

Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,

Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,

Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls surveyed.

She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled

To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;

Why stops she by this empty playhouse drear?

Ah! where the spirit its highest life hath led,

All spots, matched with that spot, are less divine;

And Rachel's Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!