University of Virginia Library


82

II.
PHŒBUS.

Dew-dappled Phœbus, with half-shaded eye,
Stalks through the portals of the eastern skies;
The stars that drop above the world on high,
Beneath his gaze close their cloud-lidded eyes;
He taps the dreaming city till it wakes
And hums and murmurs like an o'er turned hive;
With twit'ring birds the forest is alive,
And bends to see its shadow in the lakes!
In toying wavelets the soft zephyr breaks,
Bearing the perfume from the gummy pines;
Flowers, the drinking-cups of the god-sun,
Are brimmed with dew. His touch incarnadines
The dank hill tops, and all it falls upon—
The reeling grain-fields and the streams that run.