Crowd her chamber with your sweets—
Not a flower but grows for her!
Make her bed with linen sheets
That have lain in lavender:
Light a fire before she come,
Lest she find us chill at home.
Ah, what joy when Celia stands
By the leaping blaze at last,
Stooping low to warm her hands
All benumbed with the blast,
While we hide her cloak away,
To assure us she shall stay!
Cyder bring and cowslip wine,
Fruits and flavours from the East,
Pears and pippins too, and fine
Saffron loaves to make a feast;
China dishes, silver cups,
For the board where Celia sups!
Then, when all the feasting's done,
She shall draw us round the blaze,
Laugh, and tell us every one
Of her far triumphant days—
Celia, out of doors a star,
By the hearth a holier Lar!
—Agnes Mary Frances Dudaux
Love in the Valley
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couch'd with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?
Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirror'd winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!
—George Meredith