ears
The lover's hope, the distant lover's fears.
Come, bring once more that ecstasy of bliss,
The fond dear look, the smile, and ah! that kiss!
Fainting with woe, my soul refuses rest
When memory pictures how I have been blest.
See, thou didst weave a garland, love, to deck
With all spring's fairest buds thy RATI'S neck.
Sweet are those flowers as they were culled to-day,
And is my KAMA'S form more frail than they?
His pleasant task my lover had begun,
But stern Gods took him ere the work was done;
Return, my KAMA, at thy RATI'S cry,
And stain this foot which waits the rosy dye.
Now will I hie me to the fatal pile,
And ere heaven's maids have hailed thee with a smile,
Or on my love their winning glances thrown,
I will be there, and claim thee for mine own.
Yet though I come, my lasting shame will be
That I have lived one moment after thee.
Ah, how shall I thy funeral rites prepare,
Gone soul and body to the viewless air?
"With thy dear SPRING I've seen thee talk and smile,
Shaping an arrow for thy bow the while.
Where is he now, thy darling friend, the giver
Of many a bright sweet arrow for thy quiver?
Is he too sent upon death's dreary path,
Scorched by the cruel God's inexorable wrath?"

Stricken in spirit by her cries of woe,
Like venomed arrows from a mighty bow,
A moment fled, and gentle SPRING was there,
To ask her grief, to soothe her wild despair.
She beat her breast more wildly than before,
With greater floods her weeping eyes ran o'er.
When friends are nigh the spirit finds relief
In the full gushing torrent of its grief.

"Turn, gentle friend, thy weeping eyes, and see
That dear companion who was all to me.
His crumbling dust with which the breezes play,
Bearing it idly in their course away,
White as the silver feathers of a dove,
Is all that's left me of my murdered love.
Now come, my KAMA. SPRING, who was so dear,
Longs to behold thee. Oh, appear, appear!
Fickle to women LOVE perchance may bend
His ear to listen to a faithful friend.
Remember, he walked ever at thy side
O'er bloomy meadows in the warm spring-tide,
That Gods above, and men, and fiends below
Should own the empire of thy mighty bow,
That ruthless bow, which pierces to the heart,
Strung with a lotus-thread, a flower its dart.
As dies a torch when winds sweep roughly by,
So is my light for ever fled, and I,
The