Asleep, a little fisher-girl one day
Lay on the sands, within an old boat’s shade;
Her skirt was tattered, and the sea-breeze played
With her brown loosened hair a ceaseless play.
A poet chanced to pass as there she lay;
Her sun-burnt face, her tatters he surveyed;
A golden coin between her lips he laid,
And, letting her sleep on, he went his way.
What came of that gold windfall? Did it breed
Those long-loved coins which patient thrift can show
With proud pure smile to meet the household need?
Or stolen gold? or those curst coins which grow
Each year more sought, more loathed, and are the meed
Of women’s loveless kisses? Who can know?
THE PHANTOM SHIP.
We touch Life’s shore as swimmers from a wreck
Who shudder at the cheerless land they reach,
And find their comrades gathered on the beach
Watching a fading sail, a small white speck—
The phantom ship, upon whose ample deck
There seemed awhile a homeward place for each.
The crowd still wring their hands and still beseech,
But see, it fades, in spite of prayer and beck.
Let those who hope for brighter shores no more
Not mourn, but turning inland, bravely seek
What hidden wealth redeems the shapeless shore.
The strong must build stout cabins for the weak;
Must plan and stint; must sow and reap and store;
For grain takes root though all seems bare and bleak.
SPRING.
For those who note the fate of earthly things
There lurks a sadness in the April air,
A dreamy sense of what the future brings
To things too good, too hopeful, and too fair.
The spring brings greenness to the recent grave,
But brings no solace to the mourning heart;
Nor will its rustling and its piping save
A single pang to him who must depart.
The ivy bloom is full of humming bees;
The linnets whistle in the leaves on high;
Around the stems of all the orchard trees
In flaky heaps the fallen blossoms lie:
But every leaf upon each new-clad tree
Tells but of boundless mutability.
TO V. P.,
ABOUT TO VISIT OXFORD.
So you will see what I can see no more:
The broad quadrangles where the sunlit sward,
At which you peep through some old oaken door,
Is girt around by stone-work black and scarred;
The sedgy Isis, which the swift Eight cleaves
With mighty stroke, all rippled by the breeze;
The narrow Cherwell, gliding under leaves;
The City’s towers rising o’er the trees.
All this, alas, for me is fading fast,
And dimness seems descending on those walls
While Cherwell slowly glides into the Past.
The throng in cap and gown which filled those halls
Is turning into ghosts, whose names at last
I shall forget, as twilight round me falls.