Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence To theeward fly: to thy locked sense Explain none can Life’s pending plan: Thou wilt thy ignorant entry make Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake. V Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot Of earth’s wide wold for thee, where not One tear, one qualm, Should break the calm. But I am weak as thou and bare; No man can change the common lot to rare. VI Must come and bide. And such are we— Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary— That I can hope Health, love, friends, scope In full for thee; can dream thou’lt find Joys seldom yet attained by humankind! TO FLOWERS FROM ITALY IN WINTER SUNNED in the South, and here to-day; —If all organic things Be sentient, Flowers, as some men say, What are your ponderings? How can you stay, nor vanish quite From this bleak spot of thorn, And birch, and fir, and frozen white Expanse of the forlorn? Frail luckless exiles hither brought! Your dust will not regain Old sunny haunts of Classic thought When you shall waste and wane; But mix with alien earth, be lit With frigid Boreal flame, And not a sign remain in it To tell men whence you came. ON A FINE MORNING WHENCE comes Solace?—Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being, Not from noting Life’s conditions, Nor from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem. II Thus do I this heyday, holding Shadows but as lights unfolding, As no specious show this moment With its irisèd embowment; But as nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man. _February_ 1899. TO LIZBIE BROWNE I DEAR Lizbie Browne, Where are you now? In sun, in rain?— Or is your brow Past joy, past pain, Dear Lizbie Browne? II Sweet Lizbie Browne How you could smile, How you could sing!— How archly wile In glance-giving, Sweet Lizbie Browne! III And, Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair Bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair Bred out of doors, Sweet Lizbie Browne? IV When, Lizbie Browne, You had just begun To be endeared By stealth to one, You disappeared My Lizbie Browne! V Ay, Lizbie Browne, So swift your life, And mine so slow, You were a wife Ere I could show Love, Lizbie Browne. VI