Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/104

94 The sea, aye echoing eternity.

Other this soil, rich with the rose-leaf mould

Of beauty dead, breathed forth mortality.

Death choked the vital air, as on he went,

The death of beauty; here, pink-petalled, fell

The boy-loved arethusa, golden-tongued,

In the black swamp-land, moccasins by the pine;

And every flower bade memory farewell.

Oft he deplored the blue hepatica,

The earliest darling of the wood, the hills

Long since deflowered, whereon the laden bloom

Of mountain-laurel crowned his summers up

With sorrow, and the faces of old springs

Hung o'er the last year's brown and withered leaves.

O young and tender heart that saw the earth

Grown sad with beauty gone,—"Ay! this long time!"

He swept the sighing words from youthful lips:

"The grave spans all things with a little space!

Shut in the rose are summer's obsequies!

Death links with death!" and higher rose his strain:

"All things decay and vanish, changing form,

The infinite variable. The rainbow's arch

Is baseless, and the azure firmament,

Drifted with snowy mountains, range on range,

Shuts, as the lily; all that's in the world