Sleep, sweeter than love's face or home;
Love, more than immortality;
And music of the dreamy foam
For me.

Pass over her with all thy ships
With all thy stormy tides, O sea!
The memory of immortal lips
For me!

A DREAM SHAPE

With moon-white hearts that held a gleam,
I gathered wild flowers in a dream,
And shaped a woman, whose sweet blood
Was odor of the wildwood bud.

From dew, the starlight arrowed through,
I wrought a woman's eyes of blue;
The lids, that on her eyeballs lay,
Were rose-pale petals of the May.

I took the music of the breeze,
And water whispering in the trees,
And shaped the soul that breathed below
A woman's blossom breasts of snow.

Out of a rose-bud's veins I drew
The fragrant crimson beating through
The languid lips of her, whose kiss
Was as a poppy's drowsiness.

Out of the moonlight and the air
I wrought the glory of her hair,
That o'er her eyes' blue heaven lay
Like some gold cloud o'er dawn of day.

A shadow's shadow in the glass
Of sleep, my spirit saw her pass:
And, thinking of it now, meseems
We only live within our dreams.

For in that time she was to me
More real than our reality;
More real than Earth, more real than I--
The unreal things that pass and die.

THE VAMPIRE

A lily in a twilight place?
A moonflow'r in the lonely night?--
Strange beauty of a woman's face
Of wildflow'r-white!

The rain that hangs a star's green ray
Slim on a leaf-point's restlessness,
Is not so glimmering green and gray
As was her dress.

I drew her dark hair from her eyes,
And in their deeps beheld a while
Such shadowy moonlight as the skies
Of Hell may smile.

She held her mouth up redly wan,
And burning cold,--I bent and kissed
Such rosy snow as some wild dawn
Makes of a mist.

God shall not take from me that hour,
When round my neck her white arms clung!
When 'neath my lips, like some fierce flower,
Her white throat swung!

Or words she murmured while she leaned!
Witch-words, she holds me softly by,--
The spell that binds me to a fiend
Until I die.

WILL-O'-THE-WISP

I.

There in the calamus he stands
With frog-webbed feet and bat-winged hands;
His glow-worm garb glints goblin-wise;
And elfishly, and elfishly,
Above the gleam of owlet eyes,
A death's-moth cap of downy dyes
Nods out at me, nods out at me.

II.

Now in the reeds his face looks whi