25"Come out! with me the oriole cries,
Escape the demon that pursues you!
And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,
Still hiding, farther onward wooes you."
"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,
30Has poured from thy syringa thicket
The quaintly discontinuous lays
To which I hold a season-ticket,—
"A season-ticket cheaply bought
With a dessert of pilfered berries,
35And who so oft my soul has caught
With morn and evening voluntaries,—
"Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
40With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.
"A bird is singing in my brain
And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain
Fed with the sap of old romances.
45"I ask no ampler skies than those
His magic music rears above me,
No falser friends, no truer foes,—
And does not Doña Clara love me?
"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars,
50A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing,
Then silence deep with breathless stars,
And overhead a white hand flashing.
"O music of all moods and climes,
Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly,
55Where still, between the Christian chimes,
The moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!
"O life borne lightly in the hand,
For friend or foe with grace Castilian!
O valley safe in Fancy's land,
60Not tramped to mud yet by the million!
"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale
To his, my singer of all weathers,
My Calderon, my nightingale,
My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.