MY days are full of pleasant memories
Of all those women sweet
Whom I have known! How tenderly their eyes
Flash thro’ the days—too fleet!—
Which long ago went by with sun and rain,
Flowers, or the winter snow;
And still thro’ memory’s palace-halls are fain
In rustling robes to go!
Or wed, or widow’d, or with milkless breasts,
Around those women stand,
Like mists that linger on the mountain crests
Rear’d in a phantom land;
And love is in their mien and in their look,
And from their lips a stream
Of tender words flows, smooth as any brook,
And softer than a dream:
And one by one, holding my hands, they say
Things of the years agone;
And each head will a little turn away,
And each one still sigh on,
Because they think such meagre joy we had;
For love was little bold,
And youth had store, and chances to be glad,
And squander’d so his gold.
Blue eyes, and gray, and blacker than the sloe,
And dusk and golden hair,
And lips that broke in kisses long ago,
Like sun-kiss’d flowers are there;
And warm fireside, and sunny orchard wall,
And river-brink and bower,
And wood and hill, and morning and day-fall,
And every place and hour!
And each on each a white unclouded brow
Still as a sister bends,
As they would say, “Love makes us kindred now,
Who sometime were his friends.”
Thomas Ashe.
THE GUEST.
LIGHTS Love, the timorous bird, to dwell,
While summer smiles, a guest with you?
Be wise betimes and use him well,
And he will stay in winter too:
For you can have no sweeter thing
Within the heart’s warm nest to sing.
The blue-plumed swallows fly away,
Ere autumn gilds a leaf; and then
Have wit to find another day
The little clay-built house again:
He will not know, a second spring,
His last year’s nest, if Love take wing.
Thomas Ashe.
THE SECRET.
From the French of Félix Arvers.
MY life its secret and its mystery has,
A love eternal in a moment born;
There is no hope to help my evil case,
And she knows naught who makes me thus forlorn.
And I unmark’d shall ever by her pass
Aye at her side, and yet for aye alone;
And I shall waste my bitter days, alas!
And never dare to claim my love my own!
And she whom God has made so sweet and dear,
Will go her way, distraught, and never hear
This murmur round her of my love and pain;
To austere duty true, will go her way,
And read these verses full of her, and say,
“Who is this woman that he sings of then?”