An organ-grinder's melancholy tune In rainy streets, or from an attic sill The blue skies of a windy afternoon Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill: And my soul once more would be wrapped entire In the pure peace and blessing of those years Before the fierce infection of Desire Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did, Again ere long the prison-shades would fall That Youth condemns itself to walk amid, So narrow, but so beautiful withal. And I have followed Fame with less devotion, And kept no real ambition but to see Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean My dream of palpable divinity; And aught the world contends for to mine eye Seemed not so real a meaning of success As only once to clasp before I die My vision of embodied happiness. El Extraviado Over the radiant ridges borne out on the offshore wind, I have sailed as a butterfly sails whose priming wings unfurled Leave the familiar gardens and visited fields behind To follow a cloud in the east rose-flushed on the rim of the world. I have strayed from the trodden highway for walking with upturned eyes On the way of the wind in the treetops, and the drift of the tinted rack. For the will to be losing no wonder of sunny or starlit skies I have chosen the sod for my pillow and a threadbare coat for my back. Evening of ample horizons, opaline, delicate, pure, Shadow of clouds on green valleys, trailed over meadows and trees, Cities of ardent adventure where the harvests of Joy mature, Forests whose murmuring voices are amorous prophecies, World of romance and profusion, still round my journey spread The glamours, the glints, the enthralments, the nurture of one whose feet From hours unblessed by beauty nor lighted by love have fled As the shade of the tomb on his pathway and the scent of the winding-sheet. I never could rest from roving nor put from my heart this need To be seeing how lovably Nature in flower and face hath wrought, -- In flower and meadow and mountain and heaven where the white clouds breed And the cunning of silken meshes where the heart's desire lies caught. Over the azure expanses, on the offshore breezes borne, I have sailed as a butterfly sails, nor recked where the impulse led, Sufficed with the sunshine and freedom, the warmth and the summer morn, The infinite glory surrounding, the infinite blue ahead. La Nue Oft when sweet music undulated round, Like the full moon out of a perfumed sea Thine image from the waves of blissful sound Rose and thy sudden light illumined me. And in the country, leaf and flower and air Would alter and the eternal shape emerge; Because they spoke of thee the fields seemed fair, And Joy to wait at the horizon's verge. The little cloud-gaps in the east that filled Gray afternoons with bits of tenderest blue Were windows in a palace pearly-silled That thy voluptuous traits came glimmering through.