ilay "I LOVE you, sweet: how can you ever learn How much I love you?" "You I love even so, And so I learn it." How fair you are." "Sweet, you cannot know "If fair enough to earn Your love, so much is all my love's concern." "My love grows hourly, sweet." "Mine too doth grow, Yet love seemed full so many hours ago!" Thus lovers speak, till kisses claim their turn. Ah! happy they to whom such words as these In youth have served for speech the whole day long, Hour after hour, remote from the world's throng, Work, contest, fame, all life's confederate pleas,—— What while Love breathed in sighs and silences Through two blent souls one rapturous undersong. SONNET XIV. YOUTH'S SPRING-TRIBUTE. On this sweet bank your head thrice sweet and dear And see the newborn woodflowers bashful-eyed Spring's foot half falters; scarce she yet may know But April's sun strikes down the glades to-day; So shut your eyes upturned, and feel my kiss SONNET XV. THE BIRTH-BOND. HAVE you not noted, in some family Where two were born of a first marriage-bed, How still they own their gracious bond, though fed And nursed on the forgotten breast and knee?— How to their father's children they shall be In act and thought of one goodwill; but each Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love, O born with me somewhere that men forget, SONNET XVI. A DAY OF LOVE. THOSE envied places which do know her well, Even now for once are emptied of her grace: The hours of Love fill full the echoing space Now many memories make solicitous The delicate love-lines of her mouth, till, lit With quivering fire, the words take wing from it; As here between our kisses we sit thus Speaking of things remembered, and so sit Speechless while things forgotten call to us. WHAT dawn-pulse at the heart of heaven, or last What marshalled marvels on the skirts of May, Love's very vesture and elect disguise Was each fine movement,-wonder new-begot SONNET XVIII. GENIUS IN BEAUTY. BEAUTY like hers is genius. Not the call As many men are poets in their youth, But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong Even through all change the indomitable song ; So in likewise the envenomed years, whose tooth Rends shallower grace with ruin void of ruth, Upon this beauty's power shall wreak no wrong. SONNET XIX. SILENT NOON. YOUR hands lie open in the long fresh grass,— Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly When twofold silence was the song of love. SONNET XX. GRACIOUS MOONLIGHT. EVEN as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space O'er water-daisies and wild waifs of Spring, And chase night's gloom, as thou the spirit's grief. SONNET XXI. LOVE-SWEETNESS. SWEET dimness of her loosened hair's downfall Her tremulous smiles; her glances' sweet recall Her mouth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed What sweeter than these things, except the thing In lacking which all these would lose their sweet:- The breath of kindred plumes against its feet? Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,- Inexplicably filled with faint alarms : And oft from mine own spirit's hurtling harms And Love, our light at night and shade at noon, Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune; Our answering spirits chime one roundelay. |