HER EXPLANATION.

O you have wondered at me,

guessed in vain

What the real woman is you

know so well?

I am a lost illusion. Some strange

spell

Once made your friend there, with his fine disdain

Of fact, conceive me perfect. He would fain

(But could not) see me always, as be

fell

His dream to see me, plucking aspho

del,

In saffron robes, on some celestial plain. All that I was he marred and flung away In quest of what I was not, could not

be,

Lilith, or Helen, or Antigone.

Still he may search; but I have had my

day,

And now the Past is all the part for me That this world's einpty stage has left to play.

EVE'S DAUGHTER.

WAITED in the little sunny

room:

The cool breeze waved the win

dow-lace, at play,

The white rose on the porch was all in bloom,

And out upon the bay

I watched the wheeling sea-birds go and

come.

"Such an old friend,

make me stay

she would not

While she bound up her hair." I turned,

and lo,

Danaë in her shower! and fit to slay

All a man's hoarded prudence at a blow: Gold hair, that streamed away

As round some nymph a sunlit fountain's flow.

Eve's Daughter

"She would not make me wait!"

well I know

73

but

She took a good half-hour to loose and

lay

Those locks in dazzling disarrangement

so !

BLINDFOLD.

HAT do we know of the world, as we grow so old and wise?

Do the years, that still the heartbeats, quicken the drowsy eyes? At twenty we thought we knew it,

world there, at our feet;

the

We thought we had found its bitter, we knew we had found its sweet.

Now at forty and fifty, what do we make of the world?

There in her sand she crouches, the Sphinx with her gray wings furled. Soul of a man I know not; who knoweth, can foretell,

And what can I read of fate, even of self I have learned so well?

Heart of a woman I know not: how

should I hope to know,