Poems Lyrical and Dramatic :: :: University of Virginia Library

Shall I meet thee o'er the starry shore
In the gardens of eternity?
Shall I drink of thine eyes in Paradise
A seraph by the jasper sea?
Thou art fled away, my dream of day,
Upon the ebbing airs of love,
A shadow drawn into the dawn
Of the reality above.
The sobbing waves which moonlight laves
And music fills with silver chimes,
The golden streaks on mountain-peaks
Bring back thy face to me at times:
But thou art gone, the fairest one,
The only soul God gave to me:
The link is riven 'twixt me and Heaven,
The light gone from my destiny.

II

Shall thy love entwine up there with mine
Or bloom, as on this earth, apart,
While I still weep each night to sleep
The loneliness within my heart?
Still wounded rove from the kindred drove
And nurse my arrow 'neath the shade,
Or woo long calm in the odorous balm
Of the Upas boughs and the sweet nightshade?
Still loose alone that spirit's zone
Who visits but the desolate,
And finds for them in leaf and stem
Companions mute to glad their fate:
Still faint and swoon as 'neath the moon
My soul has swooned with dreams of light,
Bathing its wings in the hidden springs
And hidden echoes of delight?

III

Or shall thy smile, with its starry guile
And its ghostly haunting sweet reproach,
Become more truth than the love of youth
And the thoughts that breathe of its approach?

Shall the moon's red globe in its opal robe
And the glow-worm light of the morning star,
And the emerald gleam of the broken stream
And water-lily's floating car,
And the waves that sob and pulse and throb
In crevices of granite creeks,
And the harebell blue with its chalice of dew,
Where the hunted moth a refuge seeks,
With all most fair in earth and air,
And all I ever loved or dreamed,
Melt into the light of the infinite
And be the truth thy beauty seemed?