Then the dancing died out and the carriages came,
And the beauties took their cloaks and the men did the same,
And the wheels crunched the gravel and the lights were turned down,
And the tired beauties dozed through the cold drive to town.
Nan was the belle, and she married her beau,
Who drank, and then beat her, and she died long ago;
And Mary, her sister, is married, and gone
To a tea-planter's lodge, in the plains, in Ceylon.
And Dorothy's sons have been killed out in France,
And May lost her man in the August advance,
And Em the man jilted, and she lives all alone
In the house of this dance which seems burnt in my bone.
Margaret and Susan and Marian and Phyllis,
With red lips laughing and the beauty of lilies,
And the grace of wild-swans and a wonder of bright hair,
Dancing among roses with petals in the air
All, all are gone, and Hetty's little maid
Is so like her mother that it makes me afraid.
And Rosalind's son, whom I passed in the street,
Clinked on the pavement with the spurs on his feet.
XXVI.
Long, long ago, when all the glittering earth
Was heaven itself, when drunkards in the street
Were like mazed kings shaking at giving birth
To acts of war that sickle men like wheat;
When the white clover opened Paradise
And God lived in a cottage up the brook,
Beauty, you lifted up my sleeping eyes
And filled my heart with longing with a look.
And all the day I searched but could not find
The beautiful dark-eyed who touched me there.
Delight in her made trouble in my mind.
She was within all nature, everywhere.
The breath I breathed, the brook, the flower, the grass,
Were her, her word, her beauty, all she was.
XXVII.
Night came again, but now I could not sleep;
The owls were watching in the yew, the mice
Gnawed at the wainscot. The mid dark was deep.
The death-watch knocked the dead man's summons thrice.
The cats upon the pointed housetops peered
About the chimneys, with lit eyes which saw
Things in the darkness, moving, which they feared;
The midnight filled the quiet house with awe.
So, creeping down the stair, I drew the bolt
And passed into the darkness, and I knew
That beauty was brought near by my revolt.
Beauty was in the moonlight, in the dew,
But more within myself, whose venturous tread
Walked the dark house where death-ticks called the dead.