MY SOUTH

Of the languorous South with her wine-stained mouth,
And her easy ways, I sing.
Ah! see where she stands, my lady of lands,
With a rose in her hair and a gracious air,
Where her lovers cling.
Will she play me false for the promised waltz,
In that easiest way of hers?
Ah see! she is fair as the rose in her hair,
And the sweet love drips from her honied lips,
When her fancy stirs.
Will she lightly resist for the promised tryst
With a smile of her easy ways?
Ah see! she is smiling with a sweetness beguiling
All sorrow to laughter till it dances thereafter
In a golden maze.
Alas! alack-a-day! she dances away!
Haphazard her favor confers.
Ah! see where she dances, and her sunlit glances
All scattered apart! But I store in my heart
A smile of hers.

TO LLOYD MIFFLIN

A Poet

And thou hast oped the matrix of sweet thought,
And graven on the gem rare imagery.
Or piercing free thine arts reality,
Hast found uncarven gods, as richly wraught;
Such tints of soul, such matchless colors fraught
With all thy beings dearest phantasy;
Such fair illusive forms that luring flee,
Within the crystal web of fancy caught.
Till to thine eyes, a radiant cosmos spreads
In crystaline delight from pole to pole,
Of godly folk at play on flowry meads,
And one fair form of beauties finished whole!
Then through the golden mist one fancy threads:
It is the god of gods, thy pristine soul.

KEATS

Thou golden fragment of the sweetest dream,
That ever smiled beside the gates of morn,
And left enraptured Beauty half forlorn
And half entranced. Still for thy vanished gleam
That spirit-maiden weeps. On her refulgent stream
No more the tinted bark is lightly borne,
But frail as thought by streaming phantoms torn,
She waits forever thy returning beam.
A golden dream of art's divinity
And held bright Beauty's jeweled anadem;
Of music breathing immortality
Till stonéd silence falls a carven gem.
And but a fragment! Ah! couldst thou have sated
A bursting heart, what worlds had been created!