This starry mystery of delight That floats across my eager eyes, This pain that makes earth Paradise, These magic songs of day and night-- I know them for the things they are: A passing pain, a longing fleet, A shape that soon I shall not meet, A fading dream of veil and star. Yet, even as my lips proclaim The wisdom that the years have lent, Your absence is joy's banishment, And life's one music is your name. I love you to my heart's hid core: Those other loves? how should one learn From marshlights how the great fires burn? Ah, no! I never loved before! SONG. THE sunshine of your presence lies On the glad garden of my heart And bids the leaves of silence part To show the flowers to your dear eyes, And flower on flower blooms there and dies And still new buds awakened spring, For sunshine makes the garden wise, To know the time for blossoming. Night is no time for blossoming, Your garden then dreams otherwise, Of vanished Summer, vanished Spring, And how the dearest flower first dies. Yet from your ministering eyes Though night hath drawn me far apart On the still garden of my heart The moonlight of your memory lies. TO VERA, WHO ASKED A SONG. IF I only had time! I could make you a rhyme. But my time is kept flying By smiling and sighing And living and dying for you. The song-seed, I sow it, I water and hoe it, But never can grow it. Ah, traitress, you know it! What is a poor poet to do? Ah, let me take breath! I am harried to death By the loves and the graces That crowd where your face is That lurk in your laces and throng. Call them off for a minute, Once let me begin it The devil is in it If I can not spin it As sweet as a linnet, your song! THE POET TO HIS LOVE. ALL the flight of thoughts here, shy, bold, scared, intrusive, Fluttering in the sun, between the green and blue, Wheeling, whirling, poising, lovely and elusive, How to cage the flying thoughts, my winged delight, for you? Set a springe of rhyme, and hope to catch them in it? Strew my love as grain to lure them to the snare? Watch the hours built up, slow minute piled on minute? Still the wide sky guards their flight, and still the cage is bare. Gleam of hovering feathers, brushing me to flout me! Wings, be weary! Rest! Who loves you more than I? Caught? Oh fluttering pinions whitening air about me! Rustling wings, and distant flight, and empty cage and sky! THE MAIDEN'S PRAYER. SPRING, pretty Spring, what treasure do you bring to me? Green grass and buttercups, cherry-bloom and may? Sunshine to be glad with me, and little birds to sing to me? Warm nests to call me along the woodland way? Spring, happy Spring, what wonder will you do for me? Light the tulip lanterns, and set the furze a-fire? Fill your sky with sails of cloud on waves of living blue for me? Show me green cornfields and budding of the briar?