IV.
What have we done with meadow and lane?
Where are the flowers and the hawthorn snow?
Acres of brick in the pitiless rain,——
These are our gardens for thorpe and stow!
Summer has left us long ago,
Gone to the lands where the turtles mate
And the crickets chirp in the wild rose row;
Songs and singers are out of date.
V.
We sit and sing to a world in pain,
Our heartstrings quiver sadly and slow;
But, aye and anon, the murmurous strain
Swells up to a clangour of strife and throe,
And the folks that hearken, or friend or foe,
Are ware that the stress of the time is great
And say to themselves, as they come and go,
Songs and singers are out of date.
VI.
Winter holds us, body and brain:
Ice is over our being's flow;
Song is a flower that will droop and wane,
If it have no heaven toward which to grow.
Faith and beauty are dead, I trow
Nothing is left but fear and fate:
Men are weary of hope; and so
Songs and singers are out of date.
John Payne.
A BALLAD OF LOST LOVERS.
Beyond the end of Paradise
Where never mortal may repair,
A phantom-haunted forest lies
With twisted branches always bare,
And here unhappy lovers fare
And ever more complain their lot,
Ah! pity them that wander there,
Half-remembered and half-forgot.
There Orpheus leaves his lute and cries
No more on Eurydice the fair,
There silent Sappho sits and sighs,
Sad as the violets in her hair,
And pale Francesca's heart-strings stir
(She knows not why) if Launcelot
Look round, and dead days call to her
Half-remembered and half-forgot.