Rosemary and Rue.
I WONDER.
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I wonder, if I died to-night, And you should hear to-morrow, You'd mourn to think this one dear friend Had bid good-bye to sorrow. I wonder, if you saw a bird, The hunter's dart outflying, You'd lure it back with loving word To danger, pain, and dying. I wonder, if you saw a rose, Plucked quick in June's surrender, You'd wish it back upon the bough, To wither in November. I wonder, if you watched the moon, The tempest's rack outstripping, You'd grieve to see its silver prow In cloudless ether dipping. I wonder, if you heard a thrush Laugh out amid the clover, You'd weep because its cage door oped— Its captive days were over. I wonder, if, some happy day, When you have found your haven, You'll mourn to find this one dear friend Had been so long in heaven. |
When I die bury me by the sea. Let my first hundred years in the spirit be spent on a sunny sand-bank watching the sapphire tides break over a bluff of lifted rocks. What is any earthly trouble but a dissolving dream, when one may bury the face in golden moss and sniff the salt spume of the sea! Over the blue verge of the horizon lies Spain, and I build its castles hourly here in my heart. A distant echo rings in my ears of trucks driven over stony streets, of the crack of the cabman's whip and the shout of profane teamsters, but the only semblance to cruel driver and jaded beast of burden seen in the seaside paradise of which I write is a fat huckster and a still fatter donkey who draws the large man where he (the donkey) listeth. Here on this lifted moorland, if one wishes to go anywhere he rises up and goes forth on a carpet of crimson moss and yellow grass and is driven by a chariot of untired winds. Behind us are miles of purple moss swept by ragged shreds of September fog, and musical, here and there, with bells of grazing herds; while before us, behind us, and all around us stretches the boundless, unfathomable and mysterious sea.