und your waist my arm was pressed,
And as we walked a well-known way,
Love was between us both confessed.

But when with dawn I woke from sleep,
And slow came back the unlovely truth,
I wept, as an old man might weep
For the lost paradise of youth.

FOOTSTEPS IN THE STREET

Oh, will the footsteps never be done?
The insolent feet
Thronging the street,
Forsaken now of the only one.

The only one out of all the throng,
Whose footfall I knew,
And could tell it so true,
That I leapt to see as she passed along,

As she passed along with her beautiful face,
Which knew full well
Though it did not tell,
That I was there in the window-space.

Now my sense is never so clear.
It cheats my heart,
Making me start
A thousand times, when she is not near.

When she is not near, but so far away,
I could not come
To the place of her home,
Though I travelled and sought for a month and a day.

Do you wonder then if I wish the street
Were grown with grass,
And no foot might pass
Till she treads it again with her sacred feet?

FOR A PRESENT OF ROSES

Crimson and cream and white--
My room is a garden of roses!
Centre and left and right,
Three several splendid posies.

As the sender is, they are sweet,
These lovely gifts of your sending,
With the stifling summer heat
Their delicate fragrance blending.

What more can my heart desire?
Has it lost the power to be grateful?
Is it only a burnt-out fire,
Whose ashes are dull and hateful?

Yet still to itself it doth say,
'I should have loved far better
To have found, coming in to-day,
The merest scrap of a letter.'

IN TIME OF SORROW

Despair is in the suns that shine,
And in the rains that fall,
This sad forsaken soul of mine
Is weary of them all.

They fall and shine on alien streets
From those I love and know.
I cannot hear amid the heats
The North Sea's freshening flow

The people hurry up and down,
Like ghosts that cannot lie;
And wandering through the phantom town
The weariest ghost am I.

A NEW SONG TO AN OLD TUNE--FROM VICTOR HUGO

If a pleasant lawn there grow
By the showers caressed,
Where in all the seasons blow
Flowers gaily dressed,
Where by handfuls one may win
Lilies, woodbine, jessamine,
I will make a path therein
For thy feet to rest.

If there live in honour's sway