Sat alone in the flickering red of the flame, and the cricket
Carked to the stillness, and ever, with sullen throbs of the
pendule
Sighed the time-worn clock for the death of the days that were
perished,--
It was her whim to be sad, and she brought him the book they were
reading.
"Read it to-night," she said, "that I may not seem to be going."
Said, and mutely reproached him with all the pain she had wrought
him.
From her hand he took the volume and read, and she listened,--
All his voice molten in secret tears, and ebbing and flowing,
Now with a faltering breath, and now with impassioned abandon,--
Read from the book of a poet the rhyme of the fatally sundered,
Fatally met too late, and their love was their guilt and their
anguish,
But in the night they rose, and fled away into the darkness,
Glad of all dangers and shames, and even of death, for their love's
sake.
Then, when his voice brake hollowly, falling and fading to
silence,
Thrilled in the silence they sat, and durst not behold one another,
Feeling that wild temptation, that tender, ineffable yearning,
Drawing them heart to heart. One blind, mad moment of passion
With their fate they strove; but out of the pang of the conflict,
Through such costly triumph as wins a waste and a famine,
Victors they came, and Love retrieved the error of loving.
So, foreknowing the years, and sharply discerning the future,
Guessing the riddle of life, and accepting the cruel solution,--
Side by side they sat, as far as the stars are asunder.
Carked the cricket no more, but while the audible silence
Shrilled in their ears, she, suddenly rising and dragging the
thistle
Out of her clinging hair, laughed mockingly, casting it from her:
"Perish the thorns and splendor,--the bloom and the sweetness are
perished.
Dreary, respectable calm, polite despair, and one's Duty,--
These and the world, for dead Love!--The end of these modern
romances!
Better than yonder rhyme?... Pleasant dreams and good night, Cousin
Clement."

BY THE SEA.

I walked with her I love by the sea,
The deep came up with its chanting waves,
Making a music so great and free
That the will and the faith, which were dead in me,
Awoke and rose from their graves.

Chanting, and with a regal sweep
Of their 'broidered garments