Page:Poems Shore.djvu/145

Do you remember?—you were all away,
And I, that lovely golden afternoon
Was lured, I know not by what spell, to stray
On, on to that forlorn, forbidden gate,
My childhood's earliest dream of hopeless wonder;
And then, for the first time, some unseen Fate,
Soon as I touched them, split its leaves asunder.
And in its mystery, mute and melancholy,
I saw the lovely, desolate domain,
The spell-bound, fire-wrecked walls of Fairy's Folly.
That garden—Oh I cannot make it plain,
The solemn slumber, the forgotten grace,
The lovely lornness of that sweet dead place,
Where blush-rose thickets and ceringa flowers
Still careless strayed o'er the deserted ground,
And violets white and blue crept through the bowers,
And butterflies amongst the brambles round
Found out gay blossoms in their leaves enshrined,
And old faint memories rose upon my mind—
A violet legend on an ancient mound,
Where only now that summer dream I found.
I cannot make it plain, that wonder world
Of glory. Vaguely I remember now
A day of mystery in my childhood spent,
Far off from here, in wandering at my will
Round a deserted, beautiful domain

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