gering ere it fall; her lovely face
Gazes as o'er her own Eternity!
Those armless radiant shoulders, long ago
Perchance held arms out wide with yearning grace
For Adon by the blue Sicilian sea.

II

No; thou eternal fount of these poor gleams,
Bright axle-star of the wheeling temporal skies,
Daughter of blood and foam and deathless dreams,
Mother of flying Love that never dies,
To thee, the topmost and consummate flower,
The last harmonic height, our dull desires
And our tired souls in dreary discord climb;
The flesh forgets its pale and wandering fires;
We gaze through heaven as from an ivory tower
Shining upon the last dark shores of Time.

III

White culmination of the dreams of earth,
Thy splendour beacons to a loftier goal,
Where, slipping earthward from the great new birth,
The shadowy senses leave the essential soul!
Oh, naked loveliness, not yet revealed,
A moment hence that falling robe will show
No prophecy like this, this great new dawn,
The bare bright breasts, each like a soft white shield,
And the firm body like a slope of snow
Out of the slipping dream-stuff half withdrawn.

THE NET OF VULCAN

From peaks that clove the heavens asunder
The hunchback god with sooty claws
Loomed o'er the night, a cloud of thunder,
And hurled the net of mortal laws;
It flew, and all the world grew dimmer;
Its blackness blotted out the stars,
Then fell across the rosy glimmer
That told where Venus couched with Mars.

And, when the steeds that draw the morning
Spurned from their Orient hooves the spray,
All vainly soared the lavrock, warning
Those tangled lovers of the day:
Still with those twin white waves in blossom,
Against the warrior's rock-broad breast,
The netted light of the foam-born bosom
Breathed like a sea at rest.

And light was all that followed after,
Light the derision of the sky,
Light the divine Olympian laughter
Of kindlier gods in days gone by:
Low to her lover whispered Venus,
"The shameless net be praised for this--
When night herself no more could screen us
It snared us one more hour of bliss."

NIOBE

How like the sky she bends above her child,
One with the great horizon of her pain!