University of Virginia Library

XIII
A Forest Place

Like some sad room, devoted to the dead,
Dim with the dust of love-begotten hours,
Where dull decay sits, and gray memory lowers,
And sorrow stands beside death's ancient bed:
Where dark, above, the filmy form of dread
Spins webs; and in a dusty corner cowers
Love's fragrant dream, among forgotten flowers,
With broken lute, and bowed unhappy head:

103

So seems the Year in this old forest place,
Among Fall's tarnished purples and torn golds:
The dedicated loveliness of woe
Brooding forever on Joy's perished face,
The happiness that passed, where none beholds,
With Youth and Spring into the Long-Ago.
Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., September, 1911.