Since we have learned how beauty comes and goes:
A phantom fading from the hills like light,
Summer and slow disaster in the rose,
An April face that wanders toward the night,—
It is not strange that we who linger here,
Are haunted by the colours of the sky,
The ghost of beauty in the stricken year,
The thought of beauty gone too swiftly by.
So that men strive with chisel, pen and brush,
To save the lifted brow, the transient spring,
Happy if they may fix the fading blush,
Or make the mood a memorable thing,
And snare one glowing hour from fleeting time,
A golden bird, caged in a golden rhyme.
IN A GIRLS' SCHOOL
These walls will not forget, through later days,
How they had bloomed with lifted, tossing heads
Of swaying girls who thronged these ordered ways
Like windy tulips blowing in their beds.
Stones may remember laughter down a hall,
And eyes more bright than blossoms in the grass,—
A dream to haunt them—after all and all—
When they are dust with dusty things that pass.
So that some wind of beauty, waking then,
Whose breath shall be new summertimes for earth,
Will stir these scattered stones to dreams, again,
Of blowing shapes, of brightening eyes and mirth,
And corridors, like windy tulip beds,
Of swaying girls and beautiful, bright heads.