Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/429

HELIOTROPE That floats in tremulous languor

Around this darling of mine.

For, only yester-even,

I saw the dearest scene!

I heard the delicate footfall,

The step of my love, my queen.

Along the walk she glided:

I made no sound nor sign,

But ever, at the turning

Of her star-white neck divine,

I shrunk in the shade of the cypress,

And crouched in the swooning grass,

Like some Arcadian shepherd

To see an Oread pass.

But when she came to the border

At the end of the garden-slope,

She bent, like a rose-tree, over

That beautiful Heliotrope.

The cloud of its subtile fragrance

Entwined her in its wreath,

And all the while commingled

With the incense of her breath.

And so she glistened onward,

Far down the long parterre,

Beside the statue of Hesper,

And a hundred times more fair.

But ah! her breath had added

The perfume that I find

In this, the sweetest of flowerets,

And the paragon of its kind.

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