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 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, Autonoë!

A dream,

THE DEATH OF PROCRIS.

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

PROCRIS the nymph had wedded Cephalus: He, till the spring had warmed to slowwinged 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 over

cast.

And all day long her slight spear devious flew, And harmless swerved her arrows from their

aim,

For ever, as the ivory bow she drew,
Before her ran the still unwounded game.
Then, at the last, a hunter's cry there came,
And, lo, a hart that panted with the chase;
Thereat her cheek was lightened as with flame,
And swift she gat her to a leafy place,

Thinking, "I yet may chance unseen to see his face."

Leaping he went, this hunter Cephalus,
Bent in his hand his cornel bow he bare,
Supple he was, round-limbed and vigorous,
Fleet as his dogs, a lean Laconian pair.
He, when he spied the brown of Procris' hair
Move in the covert, deeming that apart

Some fawn lay hidden, loosed an arrow there;