city Ispahan._"

As subtilely beautiful as this, and even richer in color and flavor than
this, is the complete little poem which Mr. Aldrich calls a fragment:--

"DRESSING THE BRIDE.

"So, after bath, the slave-girls brought
The broidered raiment for her wear,
The misty izar from Mosul,
The pearls and opals for her hair,
The slippers for her supple feet,
(Two radiant crescent moons they were,)
And lavender, and spikenard sweet,
And attars, nedd, and richest musk.
When they had finished dressing her,
(The eye of morn, the heart's desire!)
Like one pale star against the dusk,
A single diamond on her brow
Trembled with its imprisoned fire!"

Too long for quotation here, but by no means too long to be read many
times over, is "Pampinea," an idyl in which the poet's fancy plays
lightly and gracefully with the romance of life in Boccaccio's
Florentine garden, and returns again to the beauty which inspired his
dream of Italy, as he lay musing beside our northern sea. The thread of
thought running through the poem is slight as the plot of
dreams,--breaks, perhaps, if you take it up too abruptly; but how
beautiful are the hues and the artificing of the jewels strung upon it!

"And knowing how in other times
Her lips were ripe with Tuscan rhymes
Of love and wine and dance, I spread
My mantle by almond-tree,
'And here, beneath the rose,' I said,
'I'll hear thy Tuscan melody.'
I heard a tale that was not told
In those ten dreamy days of old,
When Heaven, for some divine offence,
Smote Florence with the pestilence;
And in that garden's odorous shade,
The dames of the Decameron,
With each a loyal lover, strayed,
To laugh and sing, at sorest need,
To lie in the lilies in the sun
With glint of plume and silver brede!
And while she whispered in my ear,
The pleasant Arno murmured near,
The dewy, slim chameleons run
Through twenty colors in the sun;
The breezes broke the fountain's glass,
And woke aeolian melodies,
And shook from out the scented trees
The lemon-blossoms on the grass.
The tale? I have forgot the tale,--
A Lady all for love forlorn,
A rose-bud, and a nightingale
That bruised his bosom on the thorn:
A pot of rubies buried deep,
A glen, a corpse, a child asleep,
A Monk, that was no monk at all,
In the moonlight by a cas