FANCIES ABOUT A LOCK OF HAIR.
———
BY S. D. ANDERSON.
———
What is this dream that o’er me now
Comes with its bright and sunny spell,
As starlight falls on childhood’s brow?
Haply this lock of hair can tell.
Ah me! how thoughts of early years
Are linked with this dear gift of thine—
The doubts, the memories, and the tears
That cluster round this bygone shrine.
The air seems filled with boyhood’s flowers,
The perfume of the summer fields;
The dreams and gladness of the hours
That freshness to our pathway yields.
Times when the heart was glad and young,
A thousand scenes of love and truth,
That, rose-like, from our track have sprung,
Amid the dreamy times of youth.
Hours when each gushing fount of life
Leaped high amid this desert wild,
Come angel-like to calm the strife,
As once they did when Eden smiled.
Not often on life’s beaten track
Come such rich summer times,
To bring the heart’s pure sunshine back,
Like old remembered rhymes.
But now I see, deep in a wood,
Two lovers ’neath the trees so hoary;
She, blushing to the solitude
Beneath his simple touching story;
Her sweet face coyly turned away,
To hide the thoughts that on her cheek
Are mantling like the wakened day
Upon the mountain’s highest peak.
And he, perhaps some poet who
Had filled the world with golden dreams,
Hopes, that around his path upgrew,
As wild flowers deck the singing streams.
And thus, as hand in hand they go,
He tells her much we may not hear—
How his heart swelled to overflow
Under a sky so dark and drear—
How on the soul came Care and Pain,
Twin-sisters of the soulless Real,
The race and haggle for the gain
That those who win the world must feel.
The striving to become a part
Of that great sea whose tideings ever
Bears on its waves each manly heart,
That, struggling, droops its pinions never.
And now there is a bridal throng
Slow winding through the moss-grown aisle;
The ring, the vow, the nuptial song—
From age a tear, from youth a smile.
A cot with jessamine-covered door,
A streamlet singing all the day,
And on the dew-bespangled floor
A thousand golden sunbeams play.
Gay groups of happy children there,
The old oak and the breathless swing,
The shouts of laughter on the air,
The chaplets that the young girls bring.
All’s gone! except these gushing tears,
Sad relics of the joyous past,
The shrines that memory uprears
To shield the incense from the blast.
Some sleep beneath the ocean’s wave,
Some ’neath the flowers that loved ones tend,
Others have found an early grave
Where stranger skies above them bend,
And she, the cherished one, she sleeps
Beneath the violet-covered earth,
Where spring-time’s earliest cloudlet weeps
And roses have a dewy birth.
Enough, she sleeps—would that my dreams
Could rest forever by her side,
As peaceful as the morning beams
Are pillowed on the sleeping tide.