Quatrains

by William Hamilton Hayne English

Moonlight song OF THE MOCKING-BIRD
EACH golden note of music greets
The listening leaves, divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird.

NIGHT MISTS
SOMETIMES, when Nature falls asleep,
Around her woods and streams
The mists of night serenely creep—
For they are Nature’s dreams.

AN AUTUMN BREEZE
THIS gentle and half melancholy breeze
Is but a wandering Hamlet of the trees,
Who finds a tongue in every lingering leaf
To voice some subtlety of sylvan grief.

EXILES
HOPES grimly banished from the heart
Are the sad exiles that depart
To melancholy’s rayless goal,—
A bleak Siberia of the soul.

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