E CAREY.

Maidens, whose tresses shine,
Crowned with daffodil and eglantine,
Or, from their stringed buds of brier-roses,
Bright as the vermeil closes
Of April twilights, after sobbing rains,
Fall down in rippled skeins
And golden tangles, low
About your bosoms, dainty as new snow;
While the warm shadows blow in softest gales
Fair hawthorn flowers and cherry blossoms white
Against your kirtles, like the froth from pails
O'er brimmed with milk at night,
When lowing heifers bury their sleek flanks
In winrows of sweet hay, or clover banks--
Come near and hear, I pray,
My plained roundelay:
Where creeping vines o'errun the sunny leas,
Sadly, sweet souls, I watch your shining bands
Filling with stained hands
Your leafy cups with lush red strawberries;
Or deep in murmurous glooms,
In yellow mosses full of starry blooms,
Sunken at ease--each busied as she likes,
Or stripping from the grass the beaded dews,
Or picking jagged leaves from the slim spikes
Of tender pinks--with warbled interfuse
Of poesy divine,
That haply long ago
Some wretched borderer of the realm of wo
Wrought to a dulcet line:
If in your lovely years
There be a sorrow that may touch with tears
The eyelids piteously, they must be shed
FOR LYRA, DEAD.
The mantle of the May
Was blown almost within summer's reach,
And all the orchard trees,
Apple, and pear, and peach,
Were full of yellow bees,
Flown from their hives away.
The callow dove upon the dusty beam
Fluttered its little wings in streaks of light,
And the gray swallow twittered full in sight--
Harmless the unyoked team
Browsed from the budding elms, and thrilling lays
Made musical prophecies of brighter days;
And all went jocundly; I could but say.
Ah! well-a-day!
What time spring thaws the wold,
And in the dead leaves come up sprouts of gold,
And green and ribby blue, that after hours
Encrown with flowers;
Heavily lies my heart
From all delights apart,
Even as an echo hungry for the wind,
When fail the silver-kissing waves to unbind
The music bedded in the drowsy strings
Of the sea's golden shells--
That, sometimes, with their honeyed murmurings
Fill all its underswells:
For o'er the sunshine fell a shadow