And we walked in a magical garden with rivers and bowers, And my bed was of ivory and gold; And the Queen breathed soft in my ear a song of enchantment-- And I never grew old.... And I never, never came back to the earth, oh, never and never; How mother would cry and cry! There'd be snow on the fields then, and all these sweet flowers in the winter Would wither, and die.... Suppose ... and suppose ... THE CORNER STONE Sterile these stones By time in ruin laid. Yet many a creeping thing Its haven has made In these least crannies, where falls Dark's dew, and noonday shade. The claw of the tender bird Finds lodgment here; Dye-winged butterflies poise; Emmet and beetle steer Their busy course; the bee Drones, laden, near. Their myriad-mirrored eyes Great day reflect. By their exquisite farings Is this granite specked; Is trodden to infinite dust; By gnawing lichens decked. Toward what eventual dream Sleeps its cold on, When into ultimate dark These lives shall be gone, And even of man not a shadow remain Of all he has done? * * * * * JOHN DRINKWATER Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?' He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.' Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. PERSUASION I At any moment love unheralded Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread Are withered in untimely burial, So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by, And as a beggar walks unfriended ways, With but remembered beauty to defy The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days. Or in that later travelling he comes Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs Are all now that love was, and blindly spells His royal state of old a glory cursed, Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst. II. If we should part upon that one embrace, And set our courses ever, each from each, With all our treasure but a fading face And little ghostly syllables of speech; Should beauty's moment never be renewed, And moons on moons look out for us in vain, And each but whisper from a solitude To hear but echoes of a lonely pain,-- Still in a world that fortune cannot change Should walk those two that once were you and I, Those two that once when moon and stars were strange Poets above us in an April sky, Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea, Mute, and for ever, but for you and me. III.