'The lights and shadows fly! Yonder it brightens and darkens down on the plain. A jewel, a jewel dear to a lover's eye! O is it the brook, or a pool, or her window-pane, When the winds are up in the morning? 'Clouds that are racing above, And winds and lights and shadows that cannot be still, All running on one way to the home of my love, You are all running on, and I stand on the slope of the hill, And the winds are up in the morning!' He knows the window of which the flash has thus come to him, and is familiar with all the charm both of what surrounds it, and what it enshrines:-- 'Vine, vine, and eglantine, Clasp her window, trail and twine! Rose, rose and clematis, Trail and twine and clasp and kiss, Kiss, kiss; and make her a bower All of flowers, and drop me a flower, Drop me a flower.' The flowers are there, but their mistress is gone:-- 'Gone! Gone till the end of the year, Gone, and the light gone with her, and left me in shadow here! Gone--flitted away, Taken the stars from the night and the sun from the day! Gone, and a cloud in my heart, and a storm in the air! Flown to the east or the west, flitted I know not where! Down in the south is a flash and a groan: she is there! she is there!' The winter comes, but our lover holds out in spite of the season: 'Bite, frost, bite! You roll up away from the light The blue woodlouse, and the plump dormouse, And the bees are still'd and the flies are kill'd, And you bite far into the heart of the house, But not into mine.' and it passes, and spring-time comes, with 'Birds' love and birds' song, Flying here and there; Birds' song and birds' love, And you with gold for hair! 'Birds' song and birds' love Passing with the weather; Men's song and men's love, To love once and for ever.' At last he can bear the suspense no longer-- 'Shall I write to her? shall I go? Ask her to marry me by and by? * * * * * Go little letter, apace, apace; Fly! Fly to the light in the valley below-- Tell my wish to her dewy blue eye.' The letter is sent, and no answer comes; and then he despairs, as he well may, and in the 'wet west wind' of the spring he wishes himself dead: 'The mist and the rain, the mist and the rain! Is it ay or no? is it ay or no? And never a glimpse of her window-pane! And I may die but the grass will grow, And the grass will grow when I am gone, And the wet west wind and the world will go on.' The answer is still delayed:--