here is the shore will gratify my quest,
Show what I seek?
Not yours, weak Muse, to mimic that far voice,
With halting tongue;
No peace, sweet land, to bid my heart rejoice
Your groves among.

Whose is the loveliness I know is by,
Yet cannot place?
Is it perfection of the sea or sky,
Or human face?
Not yours, my pencil, to delineate
The splendid smile!
Blind in the sun, we struggle on with Fate
That glows the while.

Whose are the feet that pass me, echoing
On unknown ways?
Whose are the lips that only part to sing
Through all my days?
Not yours, fond youth, to fill mine eager eyes
Or find that shore
That will not let me rest, nor satisfies
For evermore.

BEWARE

I closed my hands upon a moth
And when I drew my palms apart,
Instead of dusty, broken wings
I found a bleeding human heart.

I crushed my foot upon a worm
That had my garden for its goal,
But when I drew my foot aside
I found a dying human soul.

THE OLD MAID

She walks in a lonely garden
On the path her feet have made,
With high-heeled shoes, gold-buckled,
And gown of a flowered brocade;

The hair that falls on her shoulders,
Half-held with a ribbon tie,
Once glowed like the wheat in autumn,
Now grey as a winter sky.

Time on her brow with rough fingers
Writes his record of smiles and tears;
And her mind, like a golden timepiece,
He stopped in the long past years.

At the foot of the lonely garden,
When she comes to the trysting place
She knew of old, there she lingers,
With a blush on her withered face.

The children out on the common:
They climb to the garden wall;
And laugh: "He will come to-morrow!"
Who never will come at all.

And often over our sewing,
As I and my neighbour sit
To gossip over this story
That has never an end to it,

"He is dead," I would say, "that lover,
Who left her so long ago,"
But my neighbour would rest her needle
To answer, "He's false I know."

"For could it be he were sleeping.
With a love that was such as this
He'd have burst through the gates of silence,
And flown to meet her kiss."

Is she best with tears or laughter,
This dame in her old brocade?
My neighbour says she is holy,