Your loveliest perfume;
No more upon your pure, immortal dyes,
Shall rest my happy eyes.
I pass by: at thy foot
O, mount of my delight!
Ere yet from out thy sight
I drop my voiceless lute;
It is in vain to strive to carry hence
Its olden eloquence.
Your sacred groves no more
My singing shall prolong,
With echoes of my song
Doubling it o'er and o'er.
Haunt of the muses, lost to wistful eyes
What dreams of thee shall rise!
Rise but to be dispelled,—
For here where I am cast,
Such visions may not last,
By sterner fancies quelled:—
Relentless Nemesis my doom hath sent,
This cruel banishment!
CHILDHOOD.
A child of scarcely seven years—
Light-haired, and fair as any lily;
With pure eyes ready in their tears
At chiding words or glances chilly:
And sudden smiles as inly bright
As lamps through alabaster shining,
With ready mirth and fancies light,
Dashed with strange dreams of child-divining:
A child in all infantile grace,
Yet with the angel lingering in her face.
A curious, eager, questioning child,
Whose logic leads to naive conclusions
Her little knowledge reconciled
To truth, amid some odd confusions:
Yet credulous, and loving much,
The problems hardest for her reason;
Placing her lovely faith on such,
And deeming disbelief a treason;—
Doubting that which she can disprove,
And wisely trusting all the rest to love.
Such graces dwell beside your hearth,
And bless you in a priceless pleasure;
Leaving no sweeter spot on earth
Than that which holds your household treasure.
No entertainment ever yet
Had half the exquisite completeness—
The gladness without one regret,
You gather from your darling's sweetness:
An angel sits beside the hearth,
Where'er an innocent child is found on earth.
AUTUMNALIA.
The crimson color lays
As bright as beauty's blush along the West:
And a warm, golden haze,
Promising sheafs of ripe autumnal days
To crown the old year's crest,
Hangs in mid-air, a half-pellucid maze,
Through which the sun, at set,
Grown round and rosy, looks with Bacchian blush,
For an old wine-god meet,
Whose brows are dripping with the grape-blood sweet,
As if his Southern flush
Rejoiced him in his Northern-zoned retreat.
The amber-colored air,
Musical is with hum of tiny things
Held idly struggling there,—
As if the golden mist untangled were
About the viewless wings
