I know not whether I love you, Dora,
But well I know you are not for me,
So darken’d and marr’d with the bitter travail
Of things that are not, and fain would be.
Keep, keep for ever your grace and gladness,
Bend once to bless me your brow of snow—
Then meet me next like some far-off sadness,
Some dead ambition of long ago.
[A RING’S SECRET]
Can you forgive me, that I wear,
Dearest, a curl of sunny hair,
Not yours—yet for the sake of Love,
And tender faith it minds me of?
’Tis in this quaint old signet ring,
A curious, chased, engraven thing
That in some window charm’d my eye
And told of the last century.
Pure gold it was, but dull and blotch’d,
And bright’ning it one day, I touch’d
A spring that oped a little lid;
And there, for generations hid
In its small shrine of pallid gold—
They made such toys in days of old—
A shred of golden hair lay curl’d;
Worth all the gold of all the world,
Perchance, to him who shrin’d it so:
Ah, ’twas a hundred years ago!
But, dearest, if he loved as I,
He loves unto eternity.
[MOONRISE IN THE ELSTER
TANNEN-WALD]
Darker than midnight, to the midnight sky
Rises the valley-ridge with all its pines.
Above that gloom a growing radiance shines,
Where the full moon floats up invisibly.
Now, half-revealed, she lifts her disk on high,
When on it, lo! in black and spectral lines
One blasted tree so wild a form designs,
That fear and wonder hold the watcher’s eye.
The minutes pass—and nothing looks the same,
But tangled in a web of silver light
Lies the great forest, dreaming and at rest.
Yet deep in memory’s core abides that sight
One moment outlined on the mountain crest—
A Shape that writhed upon a pool of flame.