a pigment to hint of the hue of her hair,
Nor the gold of her smile--O what artist could dare
To expect a result half so fair?
LAST NIGHT--AND THIS.
Last night--how deep the darkness was!
And well I knew its depths, because
I waded it from shore to shore,
Thinking to reach the light no more.
She would not even touch my hand.--
The winds rose and the cedars fanned
The moon out, and the stars fled back
In heaven and hid--and all was black!
But ah! To-night a summons came,
Signed with a teardrop for a name,--
For as I wondering kissed it, lo,
A line beneath it told me so.
And _now_--the moon hangs over me
A disk of dazzling brilliancy,
And every star-tip stabs my sight
With splintered glitterings of light!
SEPTEMBER DARK.
I.
The air falls chill;
The whip-poor-will
Pipes lonesomely behind the hill:
The dusk grows dense,
The silence tense;
And lo, the katydids commence.
II.
Through shadowy rifts
Of woodland, lifts
The low, slow moon, and upward drifts,
While left and right
The fireflies' light
Swirls eddying in the skirts of Night.
III.
O Cloudland, gray
And level, lay
Thy mists across the face of Day!
At foot and head,
Above the dead,
O Dews, weep on uncomforted!
A GLIMPSE OF PAN.
I caught but a glimpse of him. Summer was here,
And I strayed from the town and its dust and heat
And walked in a wood, while the noon was near,
Where the shadows were cool, and the atmosphere
Was misty with fragrances stirred by my feet
From surges of blossoms that billowed sheer
O'er the grasses, green and sweet.
And I peered through a vista of leaning trees,
Tressed with long tangles of vines that swept
To the face of a river, that answered these
With vines in the wave like the vines in the breeze,
Till the yearning lips of the ripples crept
And kissed them, with quavering ecstacies,
And gurgled and laughed and wept.
And there, like a dream in a swoon, I swear
I saw Pan lying,--his limbs in the dew
And the shade, and his face in the dazzle and glare
Of the glad sunshine; while everywhere,
Over, across, and around him blew
Filmy dragonflies hither and there,
And little white butterflies, two and two,
In eddies of odorous air.
OUT OF NAZARETH.
"He shall sleep unscathed of thieves
Who loves Allah and believes."
Thus
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