English posies!
Here's to match your need--
Buy a tuft of royal heath,
Buy a bunch of weed
White as sand of Muysenberg
Spun before the gale--
Buy my heath and lilies
And I'll tell you whence you hail!

Under hot Constantia broad the vineyards lie--
Throned and thorned the aching berg props the speckless sky--
Slow below the Wynberg firs trails the tilted wain--
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again.

Buy my English posies!
You that will not turn--
Buy my hot-wood clematis
Buy a frond o' fern

{64}

Gather'd where the Erskine leaps
Down the road to Lorne--
Buy my Christmas creeper
And I'll say where you were born!

West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin--
They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn--
Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main--
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again.

Buy my English posies!
Here's your choice unsold!
Buy a blood-red myrtle-bloom,
Buy the kowhai's gold
Flung for gift on Taupo's face,
Sign that spring is come--
Buy my clinging myrtle
And I'll give you back your home!

Broom behind the windy town; pollen o' the pine--
Bell-bird in the leafy deep where the _ratas_ twine--
Fern above the saddle-bow, flax upon the plain--
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again.

Buy my English posies!
Ye that have your own
Buy them for a brother's sake
Overseas, alone.

{65}

Weed ye trample underfoot
Floods his heart abrim--
Bird ye never heeded,
O, she calls his dead to him.

Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas;
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these!
Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land--
Masters of the Seven Seas, oh, love and understand.

_Rudyard Kipling._

61. THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

_A naked house, a naked moor,
A shivering pool before the door,
A garden bare of flowers and fruit
And poplars at the garden foot.
Such is the place that I live in,
Bleak without and bare within._

Yet shall your ragged moor receive
The incomparable pomp of eve,
And the cold glories of the dawn
Behind your shivering trees be drawn;
And when the wind from place to place
Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,
Your garden gloom and gleam again,
With leaping sun, with glancing rain.
Here shall the w