Has lost its freshness: in the hair's brown glow
Some strands of silver sadly, too, are straying.
The form you knew, whose beauty so enspelled,
Has lost the litheness of its loveliness:
And all the gladness that her blue eyes held
Tears and the world have hardened with distress."--
"True! true!" I answer, "O ye years that part!
These things are changed, but is her heart, her heart?"

EARTH AND MOON.

I saw the day like some great monarch die,
Gold-couched, behind the clouds' rich tapestries.
Then, purple-sandaled, clad in silences
Of sleep, through halls of skyey lazuli.
The twilight, like a mourning queen, trailed by,
Dim-paged of dreams and shadowy mysteries;
And now the night, the star-robed child of these,
In meditative loveliness draws nigh.
Earth,--like to Romeo,--deep in dew and scent,
Beneath Heaven's window, watching till a light,
Like some white blossom, in its square be set,--
Lifts a faint face unto the firmament,
That, with the moon, grows gradually bright,
Bidding him climb and clasp his Juliet.

PEARLS.

Baroque, but beautiful, between the lanes,
The valves of nacre of a mussel-shell,
Behold, a pearl! shaped like the burnished bell
Of some strange blossom that long afternoons
Of summer coax to open: all the moon's
Chaste lustre in it; hues that only dwell
With purity.... It takes me, like a spell,
Back to a day when, whistling truant tunes,
A barefoot boy I waded 'mid the rocks,
Searching for shells deep in the creek's slow swirl,
Unconscious of the pearls that 'round me lay:
While, 'mid wild-roses,--all her tomboy locks
Blond-blowing,--stood, unnoticed then, a girl,
My sweetheart once, the pearl I flung away.

IN THE FOREST.

One well might deem, among these miles of woods,
Such were the Forests of the Holy Grail,--
Broceliand and Dean; where, clothed in mail,
The Knights of Arthur rode, and all the broods
Of legend laired.--And, where no sound intrudes
Upon the ear, except the glimmering wail
Of some far bird; or, in some flowery swale,
A brook that murmurs to the solitudes,
Might think he hears the laugh of Vivien
Blent with the moan of Merlin, muttering bound
By his own magic to one stony spot;
And in the cloud, that looms above the glen,--
In which the sun burns like the Table Round,--
Might dream h