Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood
Fleets through the dusky land;
Where Scott, come home to die, has stood,
My feet returning stand.
A mist of memory broods and floats,
The border waters flow;
The air is full of ballad notes,
Borne out of long ago.
Old songs that sung themselves to me,
Sweet through a boy’s day dream,
While trout below the blossom’d tree
Plashed in the golden stream.
* * * * * *
Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill,
Fair and thrice fair you be;
You tell me that the voice is still
That should have welcomed me.
ONE FLOWER.
“Up there shot a lily red,
With a patch of earth from the land of the dead,
For she was strong in the land of the dead.”
When autumn suns are soft, and sea winds moan,
And golden fruits make sweet the golden air,
In gardens where the apple blossoms were,
In these old springs before I walked alone;
I pass among the pathways overgrown,
Of all the former flowers that kissed your feet
Remains a poppy, pallid from the heat,
A wild poppy that the wild winds have sown.
Alas! the rose forgets your hands of rose;
The lilies slumber in the lily bed;
’Tis only poppies in the dreamy close,
The changeless, windless garden of the dead,
You tend, with buds soft as your kiss that lies
In over happy dreams, upon mine eyes.
METEMPSYCHOSIS.
I shall not see thee, nay, but I shall know
Perchance, thy grey eyes in another’s eyes,
Shall guess thy curls in gracious locks that flow
On purest brows, yea, and the swift surmise
Shall follow, and track, and find thee in disguise
Of all sad things, and fair, where sunsets glow,
When through the scent of heather, faint and low,
The weak wind whispers to the day that dies.