Page:The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) Holmes.djvu/168

140 poets reading their own verses—the following stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about two feet and a half, with an occasional movement back or forward for better adjustment, the appearance of which has been likened by some impertinent young folks to that of the act of playing on the trombone. His eyesight was never better; I have his word for it.

out a stream of blood-red wine!— For I would drink to other days; And brighter shall their memory shine, Seen naming through its crimson blaze. The roses die, the summers fade; But every ghost of boyhood's dream By Nature's magic power is laid To sleep beneath this blood-red stream. It filled the purple grapes that lay And drank the splendors of the sun Where the long summer's cloudless day Is mirrored in the broad Garonne; It pictures still the bacchant shapes That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,— The maidens dancing on the grapes,— Their milk-white ankles splashed with red. Beneath these waves of crimson lie, In rosy fetters prisoned fast, Those flitting shapes that never die, The swift-winged visions of the past.