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With its colours and its odours, the beautiful and frail, These fading, and those borne away by every passing gale: How like the hopes and vanities that fill the human heart, Thus opening, in the sweet spring-time—but only to depart!

I turn on life's imaginings an eye too calm and cold, Such dreams for aye have lost on me their fascinating hold; My few glad years in fairy-land are gone beyond control, And graver thoughts, I cannot check, are rising in my soul.

For even as the crimson tints that perish as the day In grey and solemn colouring to midnight fades away, E'en so the mind, as years fleet by, doth take a deeper tone, And, by my own sad heart, fair Greek, I learn to read thine own.

Thou art pausing, gentle maiden, in the task which thou hast made, To wreathe the curls of thy bright hair into a sunny braid: