LXXII.
Who hath not wakened, dizzy, from the dream,
The fairyland, that boyhood claim’d his own?
Who hath not gulped down memories that teem,
E’er such sweet seed of madness were full grown?
Who hath not, when his wound less rawly looked,
Lightly tripped over the yet sunny fields?
What ominous garnitures have we not brook’d,
For the kind promise, that the spectre shields?
Else how much life must, vacant, pass man by,
Or seem the babblings of an uncrude mind:
How poor the pageant of the world must die
In uncongenial souls, of purpose blind:
Sooner than such I’d the light insect be,
Whose little summer world is revelry.
LXXIII.
Two children wandered o’er one plain together,
Like beauteous planets, shot from some new lair;
Proud flowers grew up, exulting in fair weather,
Tendered their sweets, and twined their glowing hair:
Some lovelier, but more lonely, lay enshrined,
Whispering the affable breath of modesty:
I marked the children; these, they oft entwined
About their locks, and thought them fair as shy:
Heedless, they trampled o’er the gaudy flowers,
Whose larger plenty paved the ensuing way:
But, soon, alas! you might well count the hours
By the few lilies, hidden far away.
At length the wanderers passed a river’s ford,
One kept his primrose wealth, one cull’d new hoard.
LXXIV.
Along the desert pathway of my years
The untarnished green of an oasis lies,
Full many a bliss, watered by love’s since tears,
Full many a note, that in the distance dies;
And I will pause, and gather fresh those sweets,
And bind their buds in chaplets on my brows;
I’ll hail what youth soe’er my wandering meets,
“See here the guerdon of my childhood’s vows.”
So, joy’s unripened blossoms shall forth peep
From dewy sluices of long-buried grief;
And love, though dead, shall through my pulses leap,
And pinnacle the Past on rapture’s reef.
Memory shall gild with fancy what is gone,
And dim indulgence dreamingly live on.