On this perverse, blind passion! Are we sent
Upon a planet just to mate and die,
A man no more than some pale butterfly
That yields his day to nature’s sole intent?
Or is my life but Marguerite’s ox-eyed flower,
That I should stand and pluck and fling away,
One after one, the petal of each hour,
Like a love-dreamy girl, and only say,
“Loves me,” and “loves me not,” and “loves me”? Nay!
Let the man’s mind awake to manhood’s power.
Edward Rowland Sill.
FANTASIA.
WE’re all alone, we’re all alone!
The moon and stars are dead and gone;
The night’s at deep, the wind asleep,
And thou and I are all alone!
What care have we though life there be?
Tumult and life are not for me!
Silence and sleep about us creep;
Tumult and life are not for thee!
How late it is since such as this
Had topped the height of breathing bliss!
And now we keep an iron sleep,—
In that grave thou, and I in this!
Harriet Prescott Spofford.
ONLY A LEAF.
WHEN the late leaves lit all the place,
He left her with her ashen face;
“We shall not meet!” he lightly cried;
“Good-bye, sweetheart, the world is wide.”
Though bright the sunshine on that day,
Though the bare boughs around her lay,
She thought in blackened shadow stood
The melancholy autumn wood.
She bent, and lifted from the sod
A leaf whereon his foot had trod,—
An idle leaf, but dead and sere,
It held the heart’s blood of a year!
Harriet Prescott Spofford.