It is good to love again;
Scan the renovated skies,
Dip and drive the idling pen,
Sweetly tint the paling lies.
Trace the dripping, piercèd heart,
Speak the fair, insistent verse,
Vow to God, and slip apart,
Little better, little worse.
Would we need not know before
How shall end this prettiness;
One of us must love the more,
One of us shall love the less.
Thus it is, and so it goes;
We shall have our day, my dear.
Where, unwilling, dies the rose
Buds the new, another year.
Story of Mrs. W——
My garden blossoms pink and white,
A place of decorous murmuring
Where I am safe from August night
And cannot feel the knife of spring.
And I may walk the pretty place
Before the curtsying hollyhocks
And laundered daisies, round of face—
Good little girls, in party frocks.
My trees are amiably arrayed
In pattern on the dappled sky,
And I may sit in filtered shade
And watch the tidy years go by.
And I may amble pleasantly
And hear my neighbors list their bones
And click my tongue in sympathy,
And count the cracks in paving stones.
My door is grave in oaken strength,
The cool of linen calms my bed,
And there at night I stretch my length
And envy no one but the dead.