THE PARADOX OF TIME.

(A VARIATION ON RONSARD.)

"Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma dame! Las! le temps non: mais Nous nous en allons!"

`IME goes, you say? Ah no!

TIM

Alas, Time stays, we go;

Or else, were this not so,
What need to chain the hours,

For Youth were always ours?
Time goes, you say?—ah no!

Ours is the eyes' deceit

Of men whose flying feet

Lead through some landscape low;

We pass, and think we see

The earth's fixed surface flee :

Alas, Time stays,—we go!

Once in the days of old,

Your locks were curling gold,

And mine had shamed the crow.

Now, in the self-same stage,

We've reached the silver age;

Time goes, you say?—ah no!

Once, when my voice was strong,
I filled the woods with song

To praise your "rose" and "snow "; My bird, that sang, is dead;

Where are your roses fled?

Alas, Time stays,—we go!

See, in what traversed ways,
What backward Fate delays

The hopes we used to know;
Where are our old desires ?—
Ah, where those vanished fires?
Time goes, you say?—ah no!

How far, how far, O Sweet,
The pass behind our feet

Lies in the even-glow!
Now, on the forward way,
Let us fold hands, and pray;

Alas, Time stays,—we go

TO A GREEK GIRL.

WITH breath of thyme and bees that hum,

Across the years you seem to come,

Across the years with nymph-like head,
And wind-blown brows unfilleted;
A girlish shape that slips the bud
In lines of unspoiled symmetry;
A girlish shape that stirs the blood
With pulse of Spring, Autonoë!

Where'er you pass,-where'er you go,
I hear the pebbly rillet flow;
Where'er you go,-where'er you pass,
There comes a gladness on the grass;
You bring blithe airs where'er you tread,—
Blithe airs that blow from down and sea;
You wake in me a Pan not dead,—

Not wholly dead !—Autonoë!

How sweet with you on some green sod
To wreathe the rustic garden-god;
How sweet beneath the chestnut's shade
With you to weave a basket-braid;

N

To watch across the stricken chords
Your rosy-twinkling fingers flee;
To woo you in soft woodland words,
With woodland pipe, Autonoë!

In vain,-in vain! The years divide:
Where Thamis rolls a murky tide,
I sit and fill my painful reams,
And see you only in my dreams ;—
A vision, like Alcestis, brought

From under-lands of Memory,—

A dream of Form in days of Thought,— A dream,-a dream, Autonoë!

THE DEATH OF PROCRIS.

A VERSION SUGGESTED BY THE SO-NAMED PICTURE OF PIERO DI COSIMO, IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.

PROCI

ROCRIS, the nymph, had wedded Cephalus :He, till the spring had warmed to slow-winged days

Heavy with June, untired and amorous,

Named her his love; but now, in unknown ways, His heart was gone; and evermore his gaze Turned from her own, and ever farther ranged His woodland war; while she, in dull amaze, Beholding with the hours her husband changed, Sighed for his lost caress, by some hard god estranged.

So, on a day, she rose and found him not.
Alone, with wet, sad eye, she watched the shade
Brighten below a soft-rayed sun that shot
Arrows of light through all the deep-leaved glade;
Then, with weak hands, she knotted up the braid
Of her brown hair, and o'er her shoulders cast
Her crimson weed; with faltering fingers made
Her golden girdle's clasp to join, and past

Down to the trackless wood, full pale and overcast.