r without love they were naught.

Millions of stars; and they roll
Over your path that is white,
Here where we end the long stroll.--
Seen of the innermost sight,
All of the love of my soul
Kisses your spirit. Good-night.

PART II.

1.

_She delays, meditating._

Sad skies and a foggy rain
Dripping from streaming eaves;
Over and over again
Dead drop of the trickling leaves;
And the woodward winding lane,
And the hill with its shocks of sheaves,
One scarce perceives.

Must I go in such sad weather
By the lane or over the hill?
Where the splitting milk-weed's feather
Dim, diamond-like rain-drops fill?
Or where, ten stars together,
Buff ox-eyes rank the rill
By the old corn-mill?

The creek by this is swollen,
And its foaming cascades sound;
And the lilies, smeared with pollen,
In the race look dull and drowned;--
'T is the path we oft have stolen
To the bridge, that rambles round
With willows crowned.

Through a bottom wild with berry
Or packed with the iron-weeds,
With their blue combs washed and very
Purple; the sorghum meads
Glint green near a wilding cherry;
Where the high wild-lettuce seeds
The fenced path leads.

A bird in the rain beseeches;
And the balsams' budding balls
Smell drenched by the way which reaches
The wood where the water falls;
Where the warty water-beeches
Hang leaves one blister of galls,
The mill-wheel drawls.

My shawl instead of a bonnet!...
Though the wood be soaking yet
Through the wet to the rock I 'll run it--
How sweet to meet in the wet!--
Our rock with the vine upon it,
Each flower a fiery jet-- ...
He won't forget!

2.

_He speaks, rowing._

Deep are the lilies here that lay
Lush, lambent leaves along our way,
Or pollen-dusty bob and float
White nenuphars about our boat
This side the woodland we have reached;
Two rapid strokes our skiff is beached.

There is no path. Heaped foxgrapes choke
Huge trunks they wrap. This giant oak
Floods from the Alleghanies bore
To wedge here by this sycamore;
Its wounded bulk, heart-rotted white,
Lights ghostly foxfire in the night.

Now oar we through this willow fringe
The bulging shore that bosks,--a tinge
Of green mists down the mar