heir mist
Round the beauty of her who sings.
They hide the soft rings of her hair,
Dear as a child's curling fingers;
They shut out the trembling sun of eyes
That are deep as a bending mother's;
And her bridal body is scarfed with their chill.

For old and old is the story;
Over and over I listen to murmurs
That are always the same in these towns that sleep;
Where grey and unwed a woman passes,
Her cramped, drab gown the bounds of a world
She holds with grief and silence;
And a gossip whose tongue alone is unwithered
Mumbles the tale by her affable gate;
How the lad must go, and the girl must stay,
Singing alone to the years and a dream;
Then a letter, a rumour, a word
From the land that reaches for lovers
And gives them not back;
And the maiden looks up with a face that is old;
Her smile, as her body, is evermore barren,
Her cheek like the bark of the beech-tree
Where climbs the grey winter.

Now have I seen her young,
The lone girl singing,
With the full round breast and the berry lip,
And heart that runs to a dawn-rise
On new-world mountains.
The weeping ash in the dooryard
Gathers the song in its boughs,
And the gown of dawn she will never wear.
I can listen no more; good-bye, little town, old Fairingdown.
I climb the long, dark hillside,
But the ache I have found here I cannot outclimb.
O Heart, if we had not heard, if we did not know
There is that in the village that never will sleep!

THE KISS

I stole into the secret room
Where Love lay dying;
Mystic and faint perfume
Met me like sighing;
As heaven had cast a still-born star
He lay nor stirred; the shell-thin hand
Nerveless of high command
Where once the lord-veins sped their fire.

And I had thought me glad
To let him go. "He reaps
His own," I pious said.
But this, ah, this
Unpleading helplessness!
"Give me thy death," I cried,
And took it from his lips.
The windows burst them wide.
The sun came in;
And Love high at my side
Stood sovereign.

YOUTH

He hears the hour's low hint and springs
To the chariot-side of Truth, while fast
The wild car swings
Through dust and cloud;
And the watchful elders, prophet-proud,
Give o'er his bones
To the wracking stones--
But he h