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Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curled, And evermore a costly kiss,

The prelude to some brighter world.

For since the time when Adam first
Embraced his Eve in happy hour,

And

every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower,

What eyes, like thine, have wakened hopes?
What lips, like thine, so sweetly joined ?
Where on the double rosebud droops
The fulness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,

Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,

That lets thee neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
And in the rights that name may give,

Are clasped the moral of thy life,

EPILOGUE.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there, O whisper to your glass, and say,

"What wonder, if he thinks me fair?" What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight,

Like long-tailed birds of Paradise,

That float through Heaven, and cannot light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court

By Cupid-boys of blooming hue

But take it earnest wed with sport,

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And either sacred unto you.

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,

A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren :
Yet say the neighbors when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all

That

grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,

And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion !

And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung

He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove

He set up his forlorn pipes,

The gouty oak began to move,
And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirred its busy crown,
And, as tradition teaches,
Young ashes pirouetted down,
Coquetting with young beeches;
And briony-vine and ivy-wreath
Ran forward to his rhyming,
And from the valleys underneath
Came little copses climbing.

The birch-tree swang her fragrant hair, The bramble cast her berry,

The gin within the juniper

Began to make him merry,

The poplars, in long order due,
With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two

AMPHION.

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,

A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren :
Yet say the neighbors when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all

That

grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion !

And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,

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