A queen of indolence and idle grace,
Robed in the remnants 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 thin, 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 listless, she, for even Fear's alarms,
While frightened nations rally in defense,
She lifts her smiling creole eyes to him,
And, reaching out her shapely, unwashed arms,
She clasps her rightful lover-Pestilence.
[THE ROOM BENEATH THE RAFTERS.]
Sometimes when I have dropped to sleep,
Draped in a soft luxurious gloom,
Across my drowsing mind will creep
The memory of another room,
Where resinous knots in roof boards made
A frescoing of light and shade,
And sighing poplars brushed their leaves
Against the humbly sloping eaves.
Again I fancy, in my dreams,
I'm lying in my trundle bed;
I seem to see the bare old beams
And unhewn rafters overhead;
The hornet's shrill falsetto hum
I hear again, and see him come
Forth from his dark-walled hanging house,
Dressed in his black and yellow blouse.
There, summer dawns, in sleep I stirred,
And wove into my fair dream's woof
The chattering of a martin bird,
Or rain-drops pattering on the roof.
Or half awake, and half in fear,
I saw the spider spinning near
His pretty castle where the fly
Should come to ruin by-and-by.
And there I fashioned from my brain
Youth's shining structures in the air,
I did not wholly build in vain,
For some were lasting, firm and fair.
And I am one who lives to say
My life has held more good than gray,
And that the splendor of the real
Surpassed my early dream's ideal.
But still I love to wander back
To that old time and that old place;
To tread my way o'er Memory's track,
And catch the early morning grace,
In that quaint room beneath the rafter,
That echoed to my childish laughter;
To dream again the dreams that grew
More beautiful as they came true.
[MY COMRADE.]
Out from my window westward
I turn full oft my face;
But the mountains rebuke the vision
That would encompass space;
They lift their lofty foreheads
To the kiss of the clouds above,
And ask, "With all our glory,
Can we not win your love?"