EURYDICE. HEAVEN'S Cup held down to me I drain, The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain; Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye The white feet of an Oread. Through our coarse art gleam, now and then, The features of angelic men: For what chance clod the soil may wait To stumble on its nobler fate, Prayer breathed in vain! no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday ; Could venture for the golden fleece When, heralding life's every phase, The tremulous leaves repeat to me No gloomier Orcus swallows thee SHE CAME AND WENT. As a twig trembles, which a bird Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent, So is my memory thrilled and stirred; I only know she came and went. As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven, The blue dome's measureless con tent, So my soul held that moment's heav en ; I only know she came and went. As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps The orchards full of bloom and scent, So clove her May my wintry sleeps ;I only know she came and went. An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went. O, when the room grows slowly dim, And life's last oil is nearly spent, One gush of light these eyes will brim, Only to think she came and went. THE CHANGELING. I HAD a little daughter, To the Heavenly Father's knee, I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair; For it was as wavy and golden, And as many changes took, To what can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover, How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, And dimpled her wholly over, Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth, And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cagedoor, My little bird used her wings. But they left in her stead a changeling, That seems like her bud in full blossom, To change and change is life, to move and never rest; Not what we are, but what we hope, is best. The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind; Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet, Patching one whole of many incomplete ; The general preys upon the individual mind, And each alone is helpless as the wind. Each man is some man's servant; every soul Is by some other's presence quite discrowned; Each owes the next through all the imperfect round, Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal, And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll. The thing we long for, that we are Helps make the soul immortal. Longing is God's fresh heavenward will With our poor earthward striving; We quench it that we may be still Content with merely living; But, would we learn that heart's full In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low Set wrong to balance wrong, What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know; These have found piteous voice in song and prose; |