Is it a dream or ghost
Of a dream that comes to me,
Here in the twilight on the coast,
Blue cinctured by the sea?
Fashioned of foam and froth—
And the dream is ended soon,
And, lo, whence came the moon-white moth
Comes now the moth-white moon!
Frank Dempster Sherman
THE SPRING BEAUTIES
The Puritan Spring Beauties stood freshly clad for church;
A Thrush, white-breasted, o'er them sat singing on his perch.
"Happy be! for fair are ye!" the gentle singer told them,
But presently a buff-coat Bee came booming up to scold them.
"Vanity, oh, vanity!
Young maids, beware of vanity!"
Grumbled out the buff-coat Bee,
Half parson-like, half soldierly.
The sweet-faced maidens trembled, with pretty, pinky blushes,
Convinced that it was wicked to listen to the Thrushes;
And when, that shady afternoon, I chanced that way to pass,
They hung their little bonnets down and looked into the grass.
All because the buff-coat Bee
Lectured them so solemnly:—
"Vanity, oh, vanity!
Young maids, beware of vanity!"
Helen Gray Cone
THE MOCKING-BIRD
He didn't know much music
When first he come along;
An' all the birds went wonderin'
Why he didn't sing a song.
They primped their feathers in the sun,
An' sung their sweetest notes;
An' music jest come on the run
From all their purty throats!