Irene's Dream
Old Urien with the grizzling auburn locks,
That on his sloping shoulders floated loose,
And worn red jacket, with his wrinkled face
And grave spare speech, quaint as some foreign tongue.
It was his very self I dreamed back there;
In his low woodland hut he reigned supreme
O'er tangled copse and thicket, and his axe
Rang with a sound of gloomy sovereignty;
While silent Nesta in and out of doors
Moved busy as some weird and withered spider.
The garden was my realm.
And then at last
There came a stranger visitor . . . . for whom
I seemed to have been waiting all my life,
So swiftly our souls met . . . . and then the pain,
The loneliness, the blankness of my loss.
That on his sloping shoulders floated loose,
And worn red jacket, with his wrinkled face
And grave spare speech, quaint as some foreign tongue.
It was his very self I dreamed back there;
In his low woodland hut he reigned supreme
O'er tangled copse and thicket, and his axe
Rang with a sound of gloomy sovereignty;
While silent Nesta in and out of doors
Moved busy as some weird and withered spider.
The garden was my realm.
And then at last
There came a stranger visitor . . . . for whom
I seemed to have been waiting all my life,
So swiftly our souls met . . . . and then the pain,
The loneliness, the blankness of my loss.
After the disappearance of the stranger, Irene describes how, in her dream, she, still dwelling in the old "Fairies' Folly," becomes intimate with those mysterious beings who are supposed now to have possession of it.
"And oh, that passing next from human life
Into the lovely, mournful Fairy-land,
Where beauteous Art, and knowledge of all things
Into the lovely, mournful Fairy-land,
Where beauteous Art, and knowledge of all things
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