Day after day for days she mutely strove,
Not to be separate from her placid love;
Perchance she thought that, breaking through the spell,
Her shadow-god, deep in the tranquil well,
Had taken her last gift;—no man may know;
Her fancies merged with all mute things that go
The poppied path, dreams and desires foredone,
The unplucked roses of oblivion.
But now she searched for words that would express
Something of all her spirit’s loneliness;
And formed a liquid jargon, full of falls
As weird and wild as ariel madrigals;
Our human tongue was far too harsh for this,
Or her slight spirit bore too great a bliss;
But always grew she very faint and pale,
Day after day her beauty grew more frail,
More mute, more eerie, more ethereal;
Her soul burned whitely in its waning shell.
Then came the winter with his frosty breath
And made the world an image of white death,
And like to death he found the charméd child;
Yet could not kill her with his bluster wild.
Only in his first days she went about,
And sadly hearkened to his hearty shout;
From windows where the wizard frost had traced
Moth-wings of rime with silver ferns inlaced,
She saw her pool set coldly in the drift,
Where in the autumn she had left her gift,
Capped with a cloud of silver steam or smoke,
That hovered there whether she dreamed or woke;
And often stealing from her early sleep,
She watched the light cloud in the midnight deep,
Waver and blow beneath the moon’s white globe,
Shivering and whispering in her chilly robe.
At last she would not look or speak at all,
And turned her large eyes to the shaded wall.
Now she is dead, they thought; but never so,
She died not when the winter winds did blow;
She was a spirit of the summer air,
She would not vanish at the year’s despair.
At length the merry sun grew warm and high,
And changed the wildwood with his alchemy;
The violet reared her bell of drooping gold,
And over her the robin chimed and trolled.
When the first slender moon of May had come,
That finds the blithe bird busy at his home,
They missed the spirit maiden from the room,
That now was sweet with light and spring perfume,
And called her all the echoing afternoon;
She answered not, but when the growing moon
Went down the west with the last bird awing,
They found her dead beside her darling spring.
This is her tale, her murmurous monument
Flows softly where her fragile life was spent,
Not grooved in brass nor trenched in pallid stone,
But told by water to the reeds alone.
She cometh here sometimes on summer eves,
Her quiet spirit lingers in the leaves,
And while this spring flows on, and while the wands
Sway in the moonlight, while in drifting bands,
The thistledown blows gleaming in the air,
And dappled thrushes haunt the precinct fair;
She will return, she will return and lean
Above the crystal in the covert green,
And dream of beauty on the shadow flung
Of irised distance when the world was young.
Let us be gone; this is no place for tears,
Let us go slowly with the guardian years;
Let us be brave, the day is almost done,
Another setting of the pleasant sun.
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.