Puslapio vaizdai
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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!"

TIME goes, you say? Ah no!

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:

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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 past 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;

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!

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