ores
Were tremulous brilliance in the morning beam;

XXXIII.

Where waited them, beside the lustrous sand,
A silk-winged shallop, sleeping on the flood;
And smoothly wafted from the hither strand,
Across the calm, broad stream they lightly rode,
Under them still the silver fishes stood;
The eager lilies, on the other land,

XXXIV.

Beckoned them; but where the castle shone
With diamonded turrets and a wall
Of gold-embedded pearl and costly stone,
Their vision to its peerless splendor thrall
The maiden fair, the young prince brave and tall,
Thither with light, unlingering feet pressed on.

XXXV.

A gallant train to meet this loving pair,
In silk and steel, moves from the castle door,
And up the broad and ringing castle stair
They go with gleeful minstrelsy before,
And "Hail our prince and princess evermore!"
From all the happy throng is greeting there.

XXXVI.

And in the hall the prince's sire, King Cole,
Sitting with crown and royal ermine on,
His fiddlers three behind with pipe and bowl,
Rises and moves to lift his kneeling son,
Greeting his bride with kisses many a one,
And tears and laughter from his jolly soul;

XXXVII.

Then both his children to a window leads
That over daisied pasture-land looks out,
And shows Bopeep where her lost flock wide feeds,
And every frolic lambkin leaps about.
She hears Boy-Blue, that lazy shepherd, shout,
Slow pausing from his pipe of mellow reeds;

XXXVIII.

And, turning, peers into her prince's eyes;
Then, caught and clasped against her prince's heart,
Upon her breath her answer wordless dies,
And leaves her gratitude to sweeter art,--
To lips from which the bloom shall never part,
To looks wherein the summer never dies!

WHILE SHE SANG.

I.

She sang, and I heard the singing,
Far out of the wretched past,
Of meadow-larks in the meadow,
In a breathing of the blast.

Cold through the clouds of sunset
The thin red sunlight shone,
Staining the gloom of the woodland
Where I walked and dreamed alone;

And glinting with chilly splendor
The meadow under the hill,
Where the lingering larks were lurking
In the sere grass hid and still.

Out they burst with their singing,
Their singing so loud and gay;
They made in the heart of October
A sudden ghastly May,

That faded and