And clothed them radiantly the while
In purple-misted destiny.
His ways change not; why should he toil
When other forces heaped the spoil?
He would evade the primal curse,
For there was money in has purse
To bide the day, foretold to come,
When that forbidding slope should bloom
With rose and myrtle and the glory
Of life's exultant, changing story.
The sapient bird he kept, and none
His matchless secret ever won;
And so the years rolled on and on
Through dusky twilight to the dawn,
And through its silvery, rising arch,
To day's illumined, joyful march.
'Tis New Year's night again, the earth
Is radiant o'er the royal birth,
With star-drift and the flower of pearl:
A robe of beauty and of light
Around its wintry dusk to-night
The woven snow-flakes softly furl.
Bowed down in helplessness and gloom,
A lodger in a squalid room
Sits brooding by a rusted stove,
In which a low fire, brooding, too,
Drops into ashes, pale and rue,
For some bird-haunted breezy grove.
And in that bent and mournful form,
Drooping to keep its thin blood warm—
Those matted locks of iron gray,
In purple-misted destiny.
His ways change not; why should he toil
When other forces heaped the spoil?
He would evade the primal curse,
For there was money in has purse
To bide the day, foretold to come,
When that forbidding slope should bloom
With rose and myrtle and the glory
Of life's exultant, changing story.
The sapient bird he kept, and none
His matchless secret ever won;
And so the years rolled on and on
Through dusky twilight to the dawn,
And through its silvery, rising arch,
To day's illumined, joyful march.
'Tis New Year's night again, the earth
Is radiant o'er the royal birth,
With star-drift and the flower of pearl:
A robe of beauty and of light
Around its wintry dusk to-night
The woven snow-flakes softly furl.
Bowed down in helplessness and gloom,
A lodger in a squalid room
Sits brooding by a rusted stove,
In which a low fire, brooding, too,
Drops into ashes, pale and rue,
For some bird-haunted breezy grove.
And in that bent and mournful form,
Drooping to keep its thin blood warm—
Those matted locks of iron gray,
