Page:Poems of Sentiment and Imagination.djvu/51

Rh ONE OF OUR POETS.

my fancy draws the picture, and for evermore he seems

Sitting silent in his chamber, brooding o'er his wondrous dreams;

Sitting motionless and weaving visions in his mighty brain—

Visions soft, and pure, and glowing, and with scarce an earthly stain—

Weaving into them his being, all its pleasures and its pain.

Coyly through the open casement steals the fragrant air of June,

Humming to itself the murmur of the woodland's pleasant tune;

Lifting up the silken curtain, through which comes the ruby tinge

Glowing in the chamber's twilight, toying with the golden fringe,

Prisoning the window-roses in its tassel-tangled swinge.

Fitful gleams of yellow sunlight flash across the velvet floor,

As the breeze in rising gladness lifts the curtain more and more,

And a smile seems stealing over the dim faces in the room,

'Till the pictured wall looks breathing through the soft and dreamy gloom.

Antique jewels seem to sparkle, and to wave the bending plume.

Nothing cares the silent dreamer that those pictures, old and dim,

Give more sense of life and motion to the gazer's eye than him;

Little heeds he sun or shadow, pleasant sounds or fragrant air;

He is in a world whose visions are a thousand times more fair,

Musing, speechless with enchantment, on the glorious beauties there.

More and more the curtain flutters, and upon the dreamer's hair

Falls the crimson glow of sunset, resting in a halo there;

On a brow so proud and pensive fitly placed the glory seems—

Looking like the lingering radiance borrowed in his land of dreams,

Broken, as the curtain flutters, into bright and changing gleams.