Poems (Welby)/The Evening Skies

by Amelia Welby

THE EVENING SKIES.

Soft skies! amid your halls to-night
 How brightly beams each starry sphere!
Beneath your softly mellowed light
 The loveliest scenes grow lovelier!
How high, how great, the glorious Power
 That bade these silvery dew-drops fall;
That touched with bloom the folded flower,
 And bent the blue sky over all.

I love to glide in these still hours
 With heart, and thought, and fancy,
When nought but stars, and waves, and flowers,
 May give me their sweet company!
When far below the waves outspread
 Glide softly on with liquid hue;
When winds are low—and skies o'er head
 Are beaming bluely beautiful.

Oh, what a heavenly hour is this!
 The green earth seems an Eden-home,—
And yet I pine amid my bliss,
 For purer blisses yet to come!
How can my spirit gaze aloft
 Upon your deep delicious blue,
And float to those far realms so oft,
 And never sigh to flutter through?

And yet this spot, so still, so lone,
 Seems formed to suit my mournful mood,
The far blue heavens seem all my own,
 And all this lovely solitude!
A voice seems whispering on the hill
 Soft as my own—and on the sea
A living spirit seems to thrill
 And throb with mine deliciously!

Yet, though my thoughts from care seem freed.
 And a soft joy pervades my breast,
That makes me almost feel indeed
 That hearts on earth are sometimes blest!
There is a spell in those hushed skies—
 A something felt in this lone spot,
That makes my very soul arise
 With longings for—it knows not what!

Beneath such skies I sometimes doubt
 My heart can e'er have dreamed of sin—
The world seems all so calm without,
 And all my thoughts so pure within!
Such dreams play o'er my folded lid!
 Such heavenly visions greet my view!
I almost seem to glide amid
 The angel-bands, an angel too!