Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten:
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,
Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!
The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;
Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!
The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;
The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;
Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,
And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.
The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;