Along the Shore | Page 3

weaves afar a wide-spread pall,
And lo! sun, day, and rose, no longer
there!
I have a lover now my life is young,
I have a love to keep this many a
day;
My heart will hold it when my life is gray,
My love will last
although my heart be wrung.
My life, my heart, my love shall fade
away!
O lover loved, the day has only gone!
In death or life, our love can
only go;
Never forgotten is the joy we know,
We follow memory
when life is done:
No wave is lost in all the tides that flow.
WHY SAD TO-DAY?
Why is the nameless sorrowing look
So often thought a whim?

God-willed, the willow shades the brook,
The gray owl sings a hymn;
Sadly the winds change, and the rain
Comes where the sunlight fell:

Sad is our story, told again,
Which past years told so well!

Why not love sorrow and the glance
That ends in silent tears?
If we
count up the world's mischance,
Grieving is in arrears.
Why should I know why I could weep?
The old urns cannot read

The names they wear of kings they keep
In ashes; both are dead.
And like an urn the heart must hold
Aims of an age gone by:
What
the aims were we are not told;
We hold them, who knows why?
THE GHOSTS OF REVELLERS.
At purple eyes beside the grain,
Our loves on altars we had burned,

And mixed our tribute with the dew,
Our tears, when rosy dawn
returned.
Our voices we had joined with song
Of bird ecstatic, light, and free;

Our laughter rollicked with the brook
Running through darkness
merrily.
At purple eyes beside the rim
Of frozen lakes our loves we burned,

And slid away when stillness reigned:
Deep the vast woods our
bodies urned.
In starlit night along the shade
Of our dusk tombs our spirits glide;

We hear the echoing of the wind,
We breathe the sighs we living
sighed.
LIFE'S BURYING-GROUND.
My graveyard holds no once-loved human forms,
Grown hideous and
forgotten, left alone,
But every agony my heart has known,--
The
new-born trusts that died, the drift of storms.
I visit every day the shadowy grove;
I bury there my outraged tender
thought;
I bring the insult for the love I sought,
And my contempt,
where I had tried to love.

BEYOND UTTERANCE.
There in the midst of gloom the church-spire rose,
And not a star lit
any side of heaven;
In glades not far the damp reeds coldly touched

Their sides, like soldiers dead before they fall;
There in the belfry
clung the sleeping bat,--
Most abject creature, hanging like a leaf

Down from the bell-tongue, silent as the speech
The dead have lost
ere they are laid in graves.
A melancholy prelude I would sing
To song more drear, while
thought soars into gloom.
Find me the harbor of the roaming storm,

Or end of souls whose doom is life itself!
So vague, yet surely sad,
the song I dream
And utter not. So sends the tide its roll,--

Unending chord of horror for a woe
We but half know, even when we
die of it.
THE SUICIDE.
A shadowed form before the light,
A gleaming face against the night,

Clutched hands across a halo bright
Of blowing hair,--her fixed
sight
Stares down where moving black, below,
The river's deathly
waves in murmurous silence flow.
The moon falls fainting on the sky,
The dark woods bow their heads
in sorrow,
The earth sends up a misty sigh:
A soul defies the
morrow!
FOR OTHERS.
Weeping for another's woe,
Tears flow then that would not flow

When our sorrow was our own,
And the deadly, stiffening blow

Was upon our own heart given
In the moments that have flown!
Cringing at another's cry
In the hollow world of grief
Stills the
anguish of our pain
For the fate that made us die
To our hopes as

sweet as vain;
And our tears can flow again!
One storm blows the night this way,
But another brings the day.
ZEST.
Labor not in the murky dell,
But till your harvest hill at morn;

Stoop to no words that, rank and fell,
Grow faster than the rustling
corn.
With gladdening eyes go greet the sun,
Who lifts his brow in varied
light;
Bring light where'er your feet may run:
So bring a day to
sorrow's night.
THE UNPERFECTED.
A broken mirror in a trembling hand;
Sad, trembling lips that utter
broken thought:
One of a wide and wandering, aimless band;
One
in the world who for the world hath naught.
A heart that loves beyond the shallow word;
A heart well loved
beyond its flowerless worth:
One who asks God to answer the prayer
heard;
One from the dust returning to the earth.
Can miracle ne'er make the mirror whole
For one who, seeing, could
be nobly bold?
Who could well die, to magnify the soul,--
Whose
strength of love will shake the graveyard's mould?
GOD-MADE.
Somewhere, somewhere in this heart
There lies a jewel from the sea,

Or from a rock, or from the sand,
Or dropped from heaven
wondrously.
Oh, burn, my jewel, in my glance!
Oh, shimmer on my lips in prayer!

Light my love's eyes to read my soul,
Which, wrapt in ashes, yet is

fair!
When dead I lie, forgotten,