4. "A hundred summers! can it be? And whither goest thou, tell me where?” "O seek my father's court with me, 66 For there are greater wonders there." Beyond their utmost purple rim, MORAL. I. So, Lady Flora, take my lay, The wildweed-flower that simply blows?. And is there any moral shut Within the bosom of the rose? 2. But any man that walks the mead, According as his humours lead, A meaning suited to his mind. And liberal applications lie In Art like Nature, dearest friend; So 't were to cramp its use, if I Should hook it to some useful end. * L'ENVOI. I. You shake your head. A random string Your finer female sense offends. Well were it not a pleasant thing To fall asleep with all one's friends; To pass with all our social ties To silence from the paths of men; And every hundred years to rise And learn the world, and sleep again ; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars, And wake on science grown to more, On secrets of the brain, the stars, As wild as aught of fairy lore; And all that else the years will show, The Poet-forms of stronger hours, The vast Republics that may grow, The Federations and the Powers; Titanic forces taking birth In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times. 2. So sleeping, so aroused from sleep Ah, yet would I 3. - and would I might! So much your eyes my fancy take Be still the first to leap to light That I might kiss those eyes awake! For, am I right or am I wrong, To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song, And I will take my pleasure there: My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', The prelude to some brighter world. 4. For since the time when Adam first And every bird of Eden burst In carol, every bud to flower, What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes ? · What lips, like thine, so sweetly join'd? Where on the double rosebud droops The fullness of the pensive mind; That lets thee neither hear nor see: Are clasp'd 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-tail'd birds of Paradise, That float thro' Heaven, and cannot light? Or old-world trains, upheld at court By Cupid-boys of blooming hueearnest wed with sport, But take it And either sacred unto you. Y ΑΜΡΗΙΟΝ. My father left a park to me, A garden too with scarce a tree And in it is the germ of all That grows within the woodland. O had I lived when song was great And ta'en my fiddle to the gate, Nor cared for seed or scion ! And had I lived when song was great, '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 stirr'd its bushy crown, And, as tradition teaches, |