O, Lady like a tea-cup,
A flower, or a fan,
What dear, archaic fancy
Devised you as it ran
Through gone Arcadian summers
Of sweet and gentle airs,
Of roses at the casement,
And slippers on the stairs?
O, Lady like a poem
Out of the olden time,
Be now the fading pattern
Of this archaic rhyme.

SALVAGE

Since we have learned how beauty comes and goes:
A phantom fading from the hills like light,
Summer and slow disaster in the rose,
An April face that wanders toward the night,--
It is not strange that we who linger here,
Are haunted by the colours of the sky,
The ghost of beauty in the stricken year,
The thought of beauty gone too swiftly by.

So that men strive with chisel, pen and brush,
To save the lifted brow, the transient spring,
Happy if they may fix the fading blush,
Or make the mood a memorable thing,
And snare one glowing hour from fleeting time,
A golden bird, caged in a golden rhyme.

IN A GIRLS' SCHOOL

These walls will not forget, through later days,
How they had bloomed with lifted, tossing heads
Of swaying girls who thronged these ordered ways
Like windy tulips blowing in their beds.
Stones may remember laughter down a hall,
And eyes more bright than blossoms in the grass,--
A dream to haunt them--after all and all--
When they are dust with dusty things that pass.

So that some wind of beauty, waking then,
Whose breath shall be new summertimes for earth,
Will stir these scattered stones to dreams, again,
Of blowing shapes, of brightening eyes and mirth,
And corridors, like windy tulip beds,
Of swaying girls and beautiful, bright heads.

AT ELSINORE

... And still, they say, when nights are nearly spent,
And watchmen take their doze, before relief,
He comes to walk upon the battlement,
And all his brow is clouded with a grief.
From end to end, from end to end he goes,
Muttering his maledictions--and a name
Of one who drowned, it seems--though no one knows,
For there's a madness in his words, they claim.

TO WILLIAM GRIFFITH

(_He that is Pierrot_)

I think your soul goes clad in dominoes,
Haunting old gardens that are always June,
To sit within the shadow of a rose,
And strum and sing your every fragile tune.
For all we meet you where the gre