This glittering sense of bright and bladed grass,
Of hedges topped with blossom, white like foam,
And moons that know a purple way to pass,—
This beauty that the mind has taken home—
Goes never wholly from us at the last,
But stays beyond each summer's slow decay,
Storing our thought with summers that are past:
Hedges and moons, white in their ancient way.
So, in some subtle instant, for their sake,
The winter world turns summer earth and sky:
Blossom and bird and musics in their wake ...
And one bright moment, ere it hurries by,
Throngs all the mind with colour, light and mirth,
Like summertimes returning through the earth.
AN OLD LOVER
Whenever he would talk to us of ships,
Old schooners lost, or tall ships under weigh,
The god of speech was neighbour to his lips,
A lover's grace on words he loved to say.
He called them by their names, and you could see
Spars in the sun, keels, and their curling foam;
And all his mind was like a morning quay
Of ships gone out, and ships come gladly home.
He filled the bay with sails we had not seen:
The Marguerita L., "a maid for shape,"
The slender Kay, the worthy Island Queen,—
That was his own, he lost her off the Cape,
"She was a ship"—and then he looked away,
And talked to us no more of ships that day.