For God placed me like a dial In the open ground, with power; All the sun and all the shower! And I suffered many losses; and my first was of the bower. Laugh ye? If that loss of mine be Of no heavy-seeming weight When the cone falls from the pine-tree, The young children laugh thereat; Yet the wind that struck it, riseth, and the tempest shall be great! One who knew me in my childhood, In the glamour and the game, Looking on me long and mild, would Never know me for the same! Come, unchanging recollections, where those changes overcame. On this couch I weakly lie on, While I count my memories,— Through the fingers which, still sighing, I press closely on mine eyes, Clear as once beneath the sunshine, I behold the bower arise. Springs the linden-tree as greenly, Stroked with light adown its rind— And the ivy-leaves serenely Each in either intertwined, And the rose-trees at the doorway, they have neither grown nor pined! From those overblown faint roses, Not a leaf appeareth shed, And that little bud discloses Not a thorn's-breadth more of red, For the winters and the summers which have passed me overhead. And that music overfloweth, Sudden sweet, the sylvan eaves; Thrush or nightingale-who knoweth ? Fay or Faunus-who believes? But my heart still trembles in me, to the trembling of the leaves. Is the bower lost, then? Who sayeth That the bower indeed is lost? Hark! my spirit in it prayeth Through the solstice and the frost, And the prayer preserves it greenly, to the last and uttermost Till another open for me In God's Eden-land unknown, With an angel at the doorway, White with gazing at His Throne; And a saint's voice in the palm-trees, singing-“ ALL A CHILD ASLEEP. How he sleepeth! having drunken Weary childhood's mandragore, From his pretty eyes have sunken Pleasures, to make room for more Sleeping near the withered nosegay, which he pulled the day before. Nosegays! leave them for the waking! Throw them earthward where they grew. Dim are such, beside the breaking Amaranths he looks unto Folded eyes see brighter colours than the open ever do. Heaven-flowers, rayed by shadows golden We may Now perhaps divinely holden, Swing against him in a wreath— think so from the quickening of his bloom and of his breath. Vision unto vision calleth, While the young child dreameth on. Fair, O dreamer, thee befalleth With the glory thou hast won! Darker wert thou in the garden, yestermorn, by summer sun. We should see the spirits ringing Round thee, were the clouds away! 'Tis the child-heart draws them, singing In the silent-seeming clay Singing!-Stars that seem the mutest, go in music all the way. As the moths around a taper, As the bees around a rose, As in sunset, many a vapour,— |