It is the season now to go
About the country high and low,
Among the lilacs hand in hand,
And two by two in fairy land.
The brooding boy, the sighing maid,
Wholly fain and half afraid,
Now meet along the hazelled brook
To pass and linger, pause and look.
A year ago, and blithely paired,
Their rough-and-tumble play they...
Suggested by a Picture by Mr. Romney
THIS relative of mine,
Was she seventy-and-nine
When she died?
By the canvas may be seen
How she looked at seventeen,
As a bride.
Beneath a summer tree,
Her maiden reverie
Has a charm;
Her ringlets are in taste;
What an arm!… what a waist
For an arm!...
Maiden! with the meek brown eyes,
In whose orbs a shadow lies
Like the dusk in evening skies!
Thou whose locks outshine the sun,-
Golden tresses wreathed in one,
As the braided streamlets run!
Standing, with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet!
Gazing, with a timid glance,...
She stood breast high amid the corn,
Clasped by the golden light of morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had won.
On her cheek an autumn flush
Deeply ripened;—such a blush
In the midst of brown was born,
Like red poppies grown with corn.
Round her eyes her tresses fell,—
Which were blackest...
How slight a thing may set one’s fancy drifting
Upon the dead sea of the Past!—A view—
Sometimes an odor—or a rooster lifting
A far-off “Ooh! ooh-ooh!”
And suddenly we find ourselves astray
In some wood’s-pasture of the Long Ago,—
Or idly dream again upon a day
Of rest we used to know.
I bit an apple but a moment since...
Between two golden tufts of summer grass,
I see the world through hot air as through glass,
And by my face sweet lights and colors pass.
Before me, dark against the fading sky,
I watch three mowers mowing, as I lie:
With brawny arms they sweep in harmony.
Brown English faces by the sun burnt red,
Rich glowing color on bare throat and...
When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And...
“and even our women,” lastly grumbles Ben,
“Leaving their nature, dress and talk like men!”
A damsel, as our train stops at Five Ashes,
Down to the station in a dog-cart dashes.
A footman buys her thicket, “Third class, parly;”
And, in the huge-buttoned coat and “Champagne Charley”
And such scant manhood else as use allows her,
Her two...
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
When thy flowery hand delivers
All the mountain-prisoned rivers,
And thy great heart beats and quivers
To revive the days that were,
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
Take my dust and all my dreaming,
Count my heart-beats one by one,
...
From “Festus”
SAY gray-beards what they please,
The heart of age is like an emptied wine-cup;
Its life lies in a heel-tap: how can age judge?
’T were a waste of time to ask how they wasted theirs;
But while the blood is bright, breath sweet, skin smooth,
And limbs all made to minister delight;
Ere yet we have shed our locks, like...
