Set by some mordant of fancy, And, spite of the wear and tear Of time or distance or trouble,

Insists on its right to be there.

A chance had brought us together; Our talk was of matters-of-course; We were nothing, one to the other, But a short half-hour's resource.

We spoke of French acting and actors,
And their easy, natural way:
Of the weather, for it was raining

As we drove home from the play.

We debated the social nothings

We bore ourselves so to discuss; The thunderous rumors of battle Were silent the while for us.

Arrived at her door, we left her
With a drippingly hurried adieu,
And our wheels went crunching the
gravel

Of the oak-darkened avenue.

As we drove away through the shadow, The candle she held in the door From rain-varnished tree-trunk to tree

trunk

Flashed fainter, and flashed no

more;

Flashed fainter, then wholly faded

Before we had passed the wood; But the light of the face behind it Went with me and stayed for good.

The vision of scarce a moment,
And hardly marked at the time,
It comes unbidden to haunt me,
Like a scrap of ballad-rhyme.

Had she beauty? Well, not what they call so :

You may find a thousand as fair; And yet there's her face in my memory With no special claim to be there.

As I sit sometimes in the twilight,
And call back to life in the coals
Oid faces and hopes and fancies
Long buried, (good rest to their
souls!)

Her face shines out in the embers,

419

I see her holding the light, And hear the crunch of the gravel And the sweep of the rain that night 'Tis a face that can never grow older. That never can part with its gleam, 'T is a gracious possession forever, For is it not all a dream?

Fate tried his bastions, she but forced a door

Leading to sweeter manhood and more sound.

Even as a wind-waved fountain's sway. ing shade

Seems of mixed race, a gray wraith shot with sun,

So through his trial faith translucent rayed

Till darkness, half disnatured so, betrayed

A heart of sunshine that would fain o'errun.

Surely if skill in song the shears may stay

And of its purpose cheat the charmed

abyss, If our poor life be lengthened by a lay, He shall not go, although his

may,

presence

And the next age in praise shall double this.

Long days be his, and each as lusty

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY.

"COME forth!" my catbird calls to me, "And hear me sing a cavatina 'That, in this old familiar tree,

Shall hang a garden of Alcina. "These buttercups shall brim with wine Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic; May not New England be divine?

My ode to ripening summer classic? "Or, if to me you will not hark,

By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing Till all the alder-coverts dark

Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

"Come out beneath the unmastered sky,

With its emancipating spaces, And learn to sing as well as I, Without premeditated graces.

"What boot your many-volumed gains, Those withered leaves forever turning,

To win, at best, for all your pains,

A nature mummy-wrapt in learning?

"The leaves wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out! with me the oriole cries, Escape the demon that pursues you! And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise, Still hiding, farther onward wooes you."

"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,

Has poured from that syringa thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays

To which I hold a season-ticket,

"A season-ticket cheaply bought

With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul hast caught With morn and evening voluntaries, "Deem me not faithless, if all day

Among my dusty books I linger, No pipe, like thee, for June to play With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

"A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies,

Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

"I ask no ampler skies than those

His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,

And does not Doña Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars, A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing, Then silence deep with breathless stars, And overhead a white hand flashing

"O music of all moods and climes,

Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes,

The moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!

"O life borne lightly in the hand,

For friend or foe with grace Castilian ! O valley safe in Fancy's land,

Not tramped to mud yet by the million !

"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale To his, my singer of all weathers, My Calderon, my nightingale,

My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

"Ah, friend, these singers dead so long,
And still, God knows, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to all song,
To Nature's self her better glory."

IN THE TWILIGHT.

MEN say the sullen instrument,
That, from the Master's bow,
With pangs of joy or woe,

Feels music's soul through every fibre

sent,

Whispers the ravished strings
More than he knew or meant ;

Old summers in its memory glow;
The secrets of the wind it sings;
It hears the April-loosened springs;
And mixes with its mood
All it dreamed when it stood
In the murmurous pine-wood
Long ago!

The magical moonlight then
Steeped every bough and cone ;
The roar of the brook in the glen
Came dim from the distance blown ;
The wind through its glooms sang
low,
And it swayed to and fro

With delight as it stood,
In the wonderful wood,
Long ago!

O my life, have we not had seasons
That only said, Live and rejoice?
That asked not for causes and reasons,

But made us all feeling and voice? When we went with the winds in their blowing,

When Nature and we were peers, And we seemed to share in the flowing Of the inexhaustible years?

Have we not from the earth drawn

juices

Too fine for earth's sordid uses?
Have I heard, have I seen

All I feel and I know?
Doth my heart overween?
Or could it have been
Long ago?

Sometimes a breath floats by me,

An odor from Dreamland sent, That makes the ghost seem nigh me Of a splendor that came and went, Of a life lived somewhere, I know not

In what diviner sphere,

Of memories that stay not and go not,
Like music heard once by an ear

That cannot forget or reclaim it,
A something so shy, it would shame
it

To make it a show,

A something too vague, could I name it,

For others to know,

As if I had lived it or dreamed it,
As if I had acted or schemed it,
Long ago!

And yet, could I live it over,

This life that stirs in my brain, Could I be both maiden and lover, Moon and tide, bee and clover,

As I seem to have been, once again,
Could I but speak and show it,
This pleasure more sharp than pain,
That baffles and lures me so,
The world should not lack a poet,
Such as it had

In the ages glad,
Long ago!

THE FOOT-PATH.

IT mounts athwart the windy hill Through sallow slopes of upland bare.

And Fancy climbs with foot-fall still Its narrowing curves that end in air.

By day, a warmer-hearted blue

Stoops softly to that topmost swell; Its thread-like windings seem a clew To gracious climes where all is well.

By night, far yonder, I surmise

An ampler world than clips my ken, Where the great stars of happier skies Commingle nobler fates of men.

I look and long, then haste me home,
Still master of my secret rare;
Once tried, the path would end in
Rome,

But now it leads me everywhere.

Forever to the new it guides,

From former good, old overmuch; What Nature for her poets hides,

'T is wiser to divine than clutch.

The bird I list hath never come

Within the scope of mortal ear;
My prying step would make him dumb,
And the fair tree, his shelter, sear.

Behind the hill, behind the sky,
Behind my inmost thought, he sings;
No feet avail; to hear it nigh,

The song itself must lend the wings.

Sing on, sweet bird close hid, and raise Those angel stairways in my brain, That climb from these low-vaulted days To spacious sunshines far from pain. Sing when thou wilt, enchantment fleet, I leave thy covert haunt untrod,

And envy Science not her feat

To make a twice-told tale of God. They said the fairies tript no more,

And long ago that Pan was dead; 'T was but that fools preferred to bore Earth's rind inch-deep for truth instead.

Pan leaps and pipes all summer long, The fairies dance each full-mooned

night,

Would we but doff our lenses strong,
And trust our wiser eyes' delight.
City of Elf-land, just without

Our seeing, marvel ever new, Glimpsed in fair weather, a sweet doubt Sketched-in, mirage-like, on the blue.

I build thee in yon sunset cloud, Whose edge allures to climb the height;

I hear thy drowned bells, inly-loud, From still pools dusk with dreams of night.

Thy gates are shut to hardiest will,

Thy countersign of long-lost speech,Those fountained courts, those chambers still,

Fronting Time's far East, who shall reach?

I know not and will never pry,

But trust our human heart for all; Wonders that from the seeker fly Into an open sense may fall.

Hide in thine own soul, and surprise

The password of the unwary elves; Seek it, thou canst not bribe their spies :

Unsought, they whisper it themselves.