THERE is a story of a beauteous land,
Where fields were fertile and where flowers were bright;
Where tall towers glistened in the morning light,
Where happy children wandered hand in hand,
Where lovers wrote their names upon the sand.
They say it vanished from all human sight,
The hungry sea devoured it in a night.
You doubt the tale? ah, you will understand;
For, as men muse upon that fable old,
They give sad credence always at the last,
However they have caviled at its truth,
When with a tear-dimmed vision they behold,
Swift sinking in the ocean of the Past,
The lovely lost Atlantis of their Youth.
THE SOUTH.
A QUEEN of indolence and idle grace,
Robed in the vestments of a costly gown,
She turns the languor of her lovely face
Upon progression with a lazy frown.
Her throne is built upon a marshy down;
Malarial mosses wreathe her like old lace;
With slim crossed feet, unshod and bare and brown.
She sits indifferent to the world’s swift race.
Across the seas there stalks an ogre grim:
Too languid she for even fear’s alarms,
While frightened nations rally in defence,
She lifts her smiling Creole eyes to him,
And reaching out her shapely unwashed arms,
She clasps her rightful lover—Pestilence.
A SAILOR’S WIFE.
(HER MEMORY.)
SUN in my lattice, and sun on the sea
(Oh, but the sun is fair),
And a sky of blue and a sea of green,
And a ship with a white, white sail between,
And a light wind blowing free—
And back from the stern, and forth from the land,
The last farewell of a waving hand.
Mist on the window and mist on the sea
(Oh, but the mist is gray),
And the weird, tall shape of a spectral mast
Gleams out of the fog like a ghost of my past,
And the old hope stirs in me—
The old, old hope that warred with doubt,
While the years with the tides surged in and out.
Rain on my window and rain on the sea
(Oh, but the rain is sad),
And only the dreams of a vanished barque
And a vanished youth shine through the dark,
And torture the night and me.
But somewhere, I think, near some fair strand,
That lost ship lies with its waving hand.