Page:Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, 1846).djvu/100

90 And I could utter no reply;

In sooth, I did not know

Why I had brought a clouded eye

To greet the general glow.

So, resting on a heathy bank,

I took my heart to me;

And we together sadly sank

Into a reverie.

We thought, "When winter comes again,

Where will these bright things be?

All vanished, like a vision vain,

An unreal mockery!

The birds that now so blithely sing,

Through deserts, frozen dry,

Poor spectres of the perished spring,

In famished troops, will fly.

And why should we be glad at all?

The leaf is hardly green,

Before a token of its fall

Is on the surface seen!"

Now, whether it were really so,

I never could be sure;

But as in fit of peevish woe,

I stretched me on the moor.