Takes through dim air her unawakened way,
The gracious ghost of morning risen ere morn.
With little unblown breasts and child-eyed looks
Following, the very maid, the girl-child spring,
Lifts windward her bright brows,

Dips her light feet in warm and moving brooks,
And kindles with her own mouth's coloring

The fearful firstlings of the plumeless boughs.

I seek thee sleeping, and awhile I see,

Fair face that art not, how thy maiden breath
Shall put at last the deadly days to death
And fill the fields, and fire the woods with thee,
And seaward hollows where my feet would be
When heaven shall hear the word that April saith,
To change the cold heart of the weary time,
To stir and soften all the time to tears,

Tears joyfuller than mirth;

As even to May's clear height the young days climb
With feet not swifter than those fair first years

Whose flowers revive not with thy flowers on earth,

I would not bid thee, though I might, give back
One good thing youth has given and borne away;
I crave not any comfort of the day

That is not, nor on time's retrodden track

Would turn to meet the white-robed hours or black
That long since left me on their mortal way;
Nor light nor love that has been, nor the breath
That comes with morning from the sun to be
And sets light hope on fire:

No fruit, no flower thought once too fair for death,
No flower nor hour once fallen from life's green tree,
No leaf once plucked or once-fulfilled desire.

The morning song beneath the stars that fled
With twilight through the moonless mountain air,
While youth with burning lips and wreathless hair
Sang toward the sun that was to crown his head,
Rising; the hopes that triumphed and fell dead,

The sweet swift eyes and songs of hours that were:
These may'st thou not give back forever; these,
As at the sea's heart all her wrecks lie waste,

Lie deeper than the sea;

But flowers thou may'st, and winds, and hours of ease, And all its April to the world thou may'st

Give back, and half my April back to me.

A FORSAKEN GARDEN.

IN a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone sand.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

Would a ghost not rise of the strange guest's hand?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;

The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.

Over the meadows that blossom and wither

Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song; Only the sun and the rain come hither, All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels

One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.

Only the wind here hovers and revels

In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply, of lovers none ever will know,

Whose eyes went seaward, a hundred sleeping

Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "Look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die — but we?

And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,

In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end-but what end who knows?

Love deep as the sea, as a rose must wither,

As the rose-red sea-weed that mocks the rose.

Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as a grave?

They are loveless now as the grass above them,

All are at one now, roses and lovers,

Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. Not a breath of the time that has been hovers

In the air now soft with a summer to be.

Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When, as they that are free now of weeping and laughter,
We shall sleep.

Here death may deal not again forever;

Here change may come not till all change end.

From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left naught living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

A MATCH.