VIOLET.
Hush, flatterer!
Yet go on with your tale.
WALTER.
Three blue days passed,
Full of the sun, loud with a thousand larks;
An evening like a grey child walked 'tween each.
'Twas in the quiet of the fourth day's noon,
The boy I speak of slumbered in the wood.
Like a dropt rose at an oak-root he lay,
A lady bent above him. He awoke;
She blushed like sunset, 'mid embarrassed speech;
A shock of laughter made them friends at once,
And laughter fluttered through their after-talk,
As darts a bright bird in and out the leaves.
All day he drank her splendid light of eyes;
Nor did they part until the deepening east
Gan to be sprinkled with the lights of eve.
VIOLET.
Go on! go on!
WALTER.
June sang herself to death.
They parted in the wood, she very pale,
And he walked home the weariest thing on earth.
That night he sat in his unlighted room,
Pale, sad, and solitary, sick at heart,
For he had parted with his dearest friends,
High aspirations, bright dreams golden-winged,
Troops of fine fancies that like lambs did play
Amid the sunshine and the virgin dews,
Thick-lying in the green fields of his heart.
Calm thoughts that dwelt like hermits in his soul,
Fair shapes that slept in fancifullest bowers,
Hopes and delights,—He parted with them all.
Linked hand in hand they went, tears in their eyes,
As faint and beautiful as eyes of flowers,
And now he sat alone with empty soul.
Last night his soul was like a forest, haunted
With pagan shapes; when one nymph slumbering lay,
A sweet dream 'neath her eyelids, her white limbs
Sinking full softly in the violets dim;
When timbrelled troops rushed past with branches green.
One in each fountain, riched with golden sands,
With her delicious face a moment seen,
And limbs faint-gleaming through their watery veil.
To-night his soul was like that forest old,
When these were reft away, and the wild wind
Running like one distract 'mong their old haunts,
Gold-sanded fountains, and the bladed flags.
[A pause.
It is enough to shake one into tears.
A palace full of music was his heart,
An earthquake rent it open to the rain;
The lovely music died—the bright throngs fled—
Despair came like a foul and grizzly beast,
And littered in its consecrated rooms.
Nature was leaping like a Bacchanal
On the next morn, beneath its sky-wide sheen
The boy stood pallid in the rosy porch.
The mad larks bathing in the golden light,
The flowers close-fondled by the impassioned winds,
The smells that came and went upon the sense,
Like faint waves on a shore, he heeded not;
He could not look the morning in the eyes.
That singing morn he went forth like a ship;
Long years have passed, and he has not returned,
Beggared or laden, home.
VIOLET.