With a Gift of Eastern Perfume

Egyptian baccharis! This gift I prize.

Of old your slave as now I watched you go

With one crowned with the pheasant’s topaz glow.

“Who’s that,” she cried, “whose heart shakes in her eyes?”

To me pointing. I dared not run nor rise,

But, crouching, o’er your baccar buds bent low.

A slave with flowers only a queen may know?

Some royal lover, hath she, I surmise!

Straightway within her eyes my doom I read.