Page:Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia.djvu/41

 :Like sunlight round you—had you sweetly died,
 * I should have loved you now as women love
 * The wonder and the silence of the West
 * When with sad eyes they breathe a last farewell
 * To where the black ships go so proudly out,—
 * Watching with twilit faces by the Sea,
 * Till down some golden rift the fading sails
 * Darken and glow and pale amid the dusk,
 * And gleam again, and pass into the gloom.


 * Nay, Violet-Crowned, once in our time we loved,
 * The hand of that love’s ghost shall lead you back.
 * Life, without you—life is an empty nest!
 * A grove with god and altar lost! A lute
 * Whereon no lonely fingers ever stray.
 * When in the moonlight Philomela mourned
 * Sad-throated for poor murdered Itylus,
 * And when the day-birds woke the dewy lawn
 * And white the sunlight fell across my bed
 * And all the dim world turned to gold again,—
 * Oft then, it seemed, the truant would come home,
 * Back as a bird to its forgotten nest,
 * And O the lute should find its song, and life
 * Be glad again!


 * Your words but live and die
 * Like desert blooms, flow’rs blown and gone again
 * Where no foot ever fell.
 * I shall go Home,—