By urchins ragged and wayworn,
Who saw, high on the stone embossed,
A laughing face, a hand that tossed
A prodigal spray just freshly torn.

What wizard hints across them fleet,--
These heirs of all the town's thick sin,
Swift gypsies of the tortuous street,
With childhood yet on cheek and chin!
What voices dropping through the din
An airy murmuring begin,--
These floating flakes, so fine and thin,
Were they and rock-laid earth akin?
Some woman of the gods was she,
The generous maiden in her glee?
And did whole forests grow within?

A tissue rare as the hoar-frost,
White as the mists spring dawns condemn,
The shadowy wrinkles round her lost,
She wrought with branch and anadem,
Through the fine meshes netting them,
Pomegranate-flower and leaf and stem.
Dropping it o'er her diadem
To float below her gold-stitched hem,
Some duchess through the court should sail
Hazed in the cloud of this white veil,
As when a rain-drop mists a gem.

Her tresses once when this was done,
--Vanished the skein, the needle bare,--
She dressed with wreaths vermilion
Bright as a trumpet's dazzling blare.
Nor knew that in Queen Dido's hair,
Loading the Carthaginian air,
Ancestral blossoms flamed as fair
As any ever hanging there.
While o'er her cheek their scarlet gleam
Shot down a vivid varying beam,
Like sunshine on a brown-bronzed pear.

And then the veil thrown over her,
The vapor of the snowy lace
Fell downward, as the gossamer
Tossed from the autumn winds' wild race
Falls round some garden-statue's grace.
Beneath, the blushes on her face
Fled with the Naiad's shifting chase
When flashing through a watery space.
And in the dusky mirror glanced
A splendid phantom, where there danced
All brilliances in paler trace.

A spicery of sweet perfume,
As if from regions rankly green
And these rich hoards of bud and bloom,
Lay every waft of air between.
Out of some heaven's unfancied screen
The gorgeous vision seemed to lean.
The Oriental kings have seen
Less beauty in their dais-queen,
And any limner's pencil then
Had drawn the eternal love of men,
But twice Chance will not intervene.

For soon with scarce a loving sigh
She lifts it off half unaware,
While through the clinging folds held high,
Arachnean in a silver snare
Her rosy fingers nimbly fare,
Till gathered square with dainty care.