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LYRICS.

LOVE’S SOMNABULIST.

• LIKE some wild sleeper who alone at night
• Walks with unseeing eyes along a height,
• With death below and only stars above;
• I, in broad daylight, walk as if in sleep,
• Along the edges of life’s perilous steep,
• The lost somnambulist of love.

• I, in broad day, go walking in a dream,
• Led on in safety by the starry gleam
• Of thy blue eyes that hold my heart in thrall;
• Let no one wake me rudely, lest one day,
• Startled to find how far I’ve gone astray,
• I dash my life out in my fall.

A MEETING.

• A TWILIGHT glow diffused on high
• Flushed all the autumn land beneath;
• Like love that lights your azure eye,
• The pond’s blue goblet on the heath
• Was brimful of the sky.

• We met by chance, and heaven’s rich hue
• Leaped to your face in rosy flame;
• Ah, is it possible you knew
• The wild delight that filled my frame
• As I caught sight of you?
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• Ah, is it possible, my love,
• That your delight can equal mine?
• Nay, then, the burning sky above
• Grows pale beside this bliss divine,
• And the deep glow thereof.

YOUR FACE.

ONLY A SMILE.

• NO butterfly whose frugal fare
• Is breath of heliotrope and clove,
• And other trifles light as air,
• Could live on less than doth my love.

• That childlike smile that comes and goes
• About your gracious lips and eyes,
• Hath all the sweetness of the rose,
• Which feeds the freckled butterflies.

• I feed my love on smiles, and yet
• Sometimes I ask, with tears of woe,
• How had it been if we had met,
• If you had met me long ago,
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• Before the fast, defacing years
• Had made all ill that once was well?
• Ah, then your smiling breeds such tears
• As Tantalus may weep in hell.

SOMETIMES I WONDER.

• SOMETIMES I wonder if you guess
• The deep impassioned tenderness
• Which overflows my heart;
• The love I never dare confess;
• Yet hard, yea, harder to repress
• Than tears too fain to start.

• Sometimes I ponder, O my sweet,
• The things I’ll tell you when we meet;
• But straightway at your sight
• My heart’s blood oozes to my feet
• Like thawing waters in the heat,
• Confused with too much light.
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• I hardly know, when you are near,
• If it is love, or joy, or fear
• Which fills my languid frame;
• Enveloped in your atmosphere,
• My dark self seems to disappear,
• A moth entombed in flame.

MANY WILL LOVE YOU.

• MANY will love you; you were made for love;
• For the soft plumage of the unruffled dove
• Is not so soft as your caressing eyes.
• You will love many; for the winds that veer
• Are not more prone to shift their compass, dear,
• Than your quick fancy flies.

• Many will love you; but I may not, no;
• Even though your smile sets all my life aglow,
• And at your fairness all my senses ache.
• You will love many; but not me, my dear,
• Who have no gift to give you but a tear
• Sweet for your sweetness’ sake.

A DREAM.

• ONLY a dream, a beautiful baseless dream;
• Only a bright
• Flash from your eyes, a brief electrical gleam,
• Charged with delight.

• Only a waking, alone, in the moon’s last gleam
• Fading from sight;
• Only a flooding of tears that shudder and stream
• Fast through the night.

ROSE D’AMOUR.

• I PLANTED a rose tree in my garden,
• In early days when the year was young;
• I thought it would bear me roses, roses,
• While nights were dewy and days were long.

• It bore but once, and a white rose only—
• A lovely rose with petals of light;
• Like the moon in heaven, supreme and lonely;
• And the lightning struck it one summer night.

SONNET.

• EVEN as on some black background full of night,
• And hollow storm in cloudy disarray,
• The forceful brush of some great master may
• More brilliantly evoke a higher light;
• So beautiful, so delicately white,
• So like a very metaphor of May,
• Your loveliness on my life’s sombre gray
• In its perfection stands out doubly bright.

• And yet your beauty breeds a strange despair,
• And pang of yearning in the helpless heart,
• To shield you from time’s fraying wear and tear
• That from yourself yourself would wrench apart;
• How save you, fairest, but to set you where
• Mortality kills death in deathless art?

A PARTING.

• THE year is on the wing, my love,
• With tearful days and nights;
• The clouds are on the wing above
• With gathering swallow‐flights.

• The year is on the wing, my sweet,
• And in the ghostly race,
• With patter of unnumbered feet,
• The dead leaves fly apace.

• The year is on the wing, and shakes
• The last rose from its tree;
• And I, whose heart in parting breaks,
• Must bid adieu to thee.

MY LADY.

• LIKE putting forth upon a sea
• On which the moonbeams shimmer,
• Where reefs and unknown perils be
• To wreck, yea, wreck one utterly,
• It were to love you, lady fair,
• In whose black braids of billowy hair
• The misty moonstones glimmer.

• Oh, misty moonstone‐coloured eyes,
• Latticed behind long lashes,
• Within whose clouded orbs there lies,
• Like lightning in the sleeping skies,
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• A spark to kindle and ignite,
• And set a fire to love alight
• To burn one’s heart to ashes.

• I will not put forth on this deep
• Of perilous emotion;
• No, though your hands be soft as sleep,
• They shall not have my heart to keep,
• Nor draw it to your fatal sphere.
• Lady, you are as much to fear
• As is the fickle ocean.

ON A VIOLA D’AMORE.

CARVED WITH A CUPID’S HEAD, AND PLAYED ON FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER MORE THAN A CENTURY.

• WHAT fairy music clear and light,
• Responsive to your fingers,
• Swells rippling on the summer night,
• And amorously lingers
• Upon the sense, as long ago
• In days of rouge and rococo!

• A century of silence lay
• On strings that had not spoken
• Since powdered lords to ladies gay
• Gave, for a lover’s token,
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• Fans glowing fresh from Watteau’s art,
• Well worth a marchioness’s heart.

• Your dormant music tranced and bound
• Was like the Sleeping Beauty
• Prince Charming in the forest found,
• And kissed in loyal duty:
• And when she woke her eyes’ blue fire
• Turned the dumb forest to a lyre.

• Thus Amor with the bandaged eyes,
• Fit symbol of hushed numbers,
• Most musically wakes and sighs
• After an age of slumbers:
• Beneath your magic bow’s control.
• The Viol has regained her soul.

A CHILD’S FANCY.

• “HUSH, hush! Speak softly, Mother dear,
• So that the daisies may not hear;
• For when the stars begin to peep,
• The pretty daisies go to sleep.

• “See, Mother, round us on the lawn;
• With soft white lashes closely drawn,
• They’ve shut their eyes so golden‐gay,
• That looked up through the long, long day.

• “But now they’re tired of all the fun—
• Of bees and birds, of wind and sun
• Playing their game at hide‐and‐seek;—
• Then very softly let us speak.”
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• A myriad stars above the child
• Looked down from heaven and sweetly smiled;
• But not a star in all the skies
• Beamed on him with his Mother’s eyes.

• She stroked his curly chestnut head,
• And whispering very softly, said,
• “I’d quite forgotten they might hear;
• Thank you for that reminder, dear.”

LASSITUDE.

• I LAID me down beside the sea,
• Endless in blue monotony;
• The clouds were anchored in the sky,
• Sometimes a sail went idling by.

• Upon the shingles on the beach
• Gray linen was spread out to bleach,
• And gently with a gentle swell
• The languid ripples rose and fell.

• A fisher‐boy, in level line,
• Cast stone by stone into the brine:
• Methought I too might do as he,
• And cast my sorrows on the sea.
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• The old, old sorrows in a heap
• Dropped heavily into the deep;
• But with its sorrow on that day
• My heart itself was cast away.

SEEKING.

• IN many a shape and fleeting apparition,
• Sublime in age or with clear morning eyes,
• Ever I seek thee, tantalizing Vision,
• Which beckoning flies.

• Ever I seek Thee, O evasive Presence,
• Which on the far horizon’s utmost verge,
• Like some wild star in luminous evanescence,
• Shoots o’er the surge.

• Ever I seek Thy features ever flying,
• Which ne’er beheld I never can forget:
• Lightning which flames through love, and mimics dying
• In souls that set.
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• Ever I seek Thee through all clouds of error;
• As when the moon behind earth’s shadow slips,
• She wears a momentary mask of terror
• In brief eclipse.

• Ever I seek Thee, passionately yearning;
• Like altar‐fire on some forgotten fane,
• My life flames up irrevocably burning,
• And burnt in vain.