Smiling on the sun that cheer'd us,
Rising lightly from the rain,
Never folding up your freshness
Save to give it forth again:
Never shaken, save by accents
From a tongue that was not free,
As the modest blossom trembles
At the wooing of the bee.
O! 'tis sad to lie and reckon
All the days of faded youth,
All the vows that we believed in,
All the words we spoke in truth.
Sever'd—were it sever'd only
By an idle thought of strife,
Such as time might knit together;
Not the broken chord of life!
O my heart! that once so truly
Kept another's time and tune,
Heart, that kindled in the spring-tide,
Look around thee in the noon.
Where are they who gave the impulse
To thy earliest thought and flow?
Look around the ruin'd garden—
All are wither'd, dropp'd, or low!
Seek the birth-place of the lily,
Dearer to the boyish dream
Than the golden cups of Eden,
Floating on its slumbrous stream;
Never more shalt thou behold her—
She, the noblest, fairest, best:
She that rose in fullest beauty,
Like a queen, above the rest.
Only still I keep her image
As a thought that cannot die,
He who raised the shade of Helen
Had no greater power than I.
O! I fling my spirit backward,
And I pass o'er years of pain;
All I loved is rising round me,
All the lost returns again.