And deep into the dying day "I'd sleep another hundred years, "O eyes long laid in happy sleep!" "O happy sleep, that lightly fled!” "O happy kiss, that woke thy sleep!" "O love, thy kiss would wake the dead!" And o'er them many a flowing range Of vapor buoyed the crescent-bark, And, rapt through many a rosy change, The twilight died into the dark. “A hundred summers! can it be? And whither goest thou, tell me where !" "O seek my father's court with me, For there are greater wonders there." And o'er the hills, and far away Beyond their utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, across the day, Through all the world she followed him. MORAL. So, Lady Flora, take my lay, O, to what uses shall we put The wildweed-flower that simply blows? And is there any moral shut Within the bosom of the rose? But any man that walks the mead A meaning suited to his mind. In Art like Nature, dearest friend; Should hook it to some useful end. L'ENVOI. You shake your head. A random string To silence from the paths of men; And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep through 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. So sleeping, so aroused from sleep Through sunny decades new and strange, Ah, yet would I—and would I might! That I might kiss those eyes awake! To choose your own you did not care; My fancy, ranging through and through, The prelude to some brighter world. For since the time when Adam first In carol, every bud to flower, What eyes, like thine, have wakened hopes? That lets thee neither hear nor see: 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 hueBut take it earnest wed with sport, And either sacred unto you. AMPHION. My father left a park to me, And in it is the germ of all That grows within the woodland. O had I lived when song was great Nor cared for seed or scion! "Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung The mountain stirred its bushy crown, The linden broke her ranks and rent The shock-head willows two and two Came wet-shod alder from the wave, Old elms came breaking from the vine, And wasn't it a sight to see, When, ere his song was ended, And shepherds from the mountain-eaves |