She roves through shadowy solitudes,
Where scentless herbs and fragile flowers
Pine in the gloom that ever broods
Around her sylvan bowers.
No winds amid the branches sigh,
No football wakes the sodden ground;
And the cold streams that hurry by
Flow on without a sound.
Strange, voiceless birds from spray to spray...
The bedouins OF THE SKIES
YON clouds that roam the deserts of the air,
On wind-swift barbs, o’er many an azure plain,
Scarce pause to lift to Allah one small prayer,
Ere Ishmael’s spirit drives them forth again.
THE TWO SPIRITS
I DREAMED two spirits came—one dusk as night:
“Mortals miscall me Life,” he sadly saith;
The other...
The bearded grass waves in the summer breeze;
The sunlight sleeps along the distant hills;
Faint is the music of the murmuring rills,
And faint the drowsy piping of the bees.
The languid leaves scarce stir upon the trees,
And scarce is heard the clangor of the mills
In the far distance, and the high, sharp trills
Of the cicada die upon...
Yet, o my friend—pale conjurer, I call
Thee friend—bring, bring the dead not back again,
Since for the tears, the darkness and the pain
Of unrequited friendship—for the gall
That hatred mingles with fond love—for all
Life’s endless turmoil, bitterness and bane,
Thou hast given dreamless rest. Still let the rain,
And sunshine, and the dews...
O dawn upon me slowly, Paradise!
Come not too suddenly,
Lest my just-opened, unaccustomed eyes
Smitten with blindness be.
To those who from Time’s penury and woe
Rise to thy heights afar,
Down which the floods of glory fall and flow,
Too great thy splendors are.
So grow upon me slowly; sweetly break
Across...
