_Rejoice, because such skies are blue, Each dawn, above a world so fair, Because such glories still renew To transient eyes the morning’s hue. Such buds on every fruit-tree smile, Such perfumes blow on every gale, Such constellated hangings veil The outer emptiness awhile; And these frail senses that were thine, Because so frail, and worn so fine, Are as a Venice glass, wherethrough Life’s last drop of evening wine Shall like a draught of morning shine._ The glories go; their footsteps fade Into an all-including shade, And isles and sea and clouds and coasts Wane to an underworld of ghosts. But as I grope with doubtful foot By myrtle branch and lentisk root Up the precipitous pine-dark way, Through fringes of the perished day Falters a star, the first alight, And threaded on that tenuous ray The age-long promise reappears, And life is Beauty, fringed with tears. DIEU D’AMOUR [A CASTLE IN CYPRUS] Beauty hath two great wings That lift me to her height, Though steep her secret dwelling clings ’Twixt earth and light. Thither my startled soul she brings In a murmur and stir of plumes, And blue air cloven, And in aerial rooms Windowed on starry springs Shows me the singing looms Whereon her worlds are woven; Then, in her awful breast, Those heights descending, Bears me, a child at rest, At the day’s ending, Till earth, familiar as a nest, Again receives me, And Beauty veiled in night, Benignly bending, Drops from the sinking west One feather of our flight, And on faint sandals leaves me. SEGESTA High in the secret places of the hills Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude, No ruin but a vision unachieved.