SHE came with garments scant and poor and thin,
And white feet gleaming bare;
With pallid smiles where April tears had been,
And snowflakes on her hair.
Oh, never—Winter thought—such gentle look
In all the land was seen!
From his gray locks the diadem he took
And crowned her as his queen.
And now, in silken robes and gems arrayed,
Fair Spring reigns in his stead.
Upon his throne she sits, the beggar maid—
"Cophetua" is dead.
Winter Beauty.
WHEN I go through the meadows brown,
Where stand the tall weeds, sere and dead,
Think you I find no beauty there,
Since Summer through the fields has fled?
The edges of the frozen stream,
Whose quiet waters late were crossed
By shadows of the bending fern,
Are fair with fringes of the frost.
Wherever cowslips crowded thick,
Or banks of buttercups would be,
A host of airy forms in white,
Like ghosts of flowers returned, I see.
It may be clustered flakes of snow,
Or frozen dew still glistening there,
But still it seems as if there came
A rare, strange odor through the air.
October.
ACROSS the stubble fields the lazy breezes pass,
From Autumn orchards sloping southward in the sun,
Where dropping from the low-hung branches, one by one,
The apples hide in tangles of the wind-blown grass.
A warm, sweet scent of mellow fruit fills all the air,
And faintly over hills and hollows comes the cry
Of some shrill bluejay, and his mate's far-off reply.
Like Ruth, the winds will go a-gleaning, by and by,
And garner in the leaves till all the woods are bare.
But now my boyhood's love has come again to me,
October—in her royal red and gold arrayed!
She comes with glowing cheeks, my dusky Indian maid,
And all the world seems bright because so bright is she.
Unto her lips the wild grapes hold their spicy wine.
Persimmons, sweet and golden with an early frost,
Drop at her feet; and where the narrow creek has crossed
The woods, and in the ferns and flag its way has lost,
Blood-red the corals of the dog-wood berries shine.
And thus she comes, my Love I loved when I was young!
We wander for a little while across the hills,
And, as of old, her sunny presence warms and fills
My heart. But like a lute with one string left unstrung,
When I would sing again the song of other years,
Something is lost. The harmony is incomplete.
And though the same old melody I still repeat,
One alto note of joy is gone that made it sweet,
And something trembles in the Autumn haze like tears.