From the Land of Dreams :: :: University of Virginia Library

In that sweet hour when thought dreams on her throne?
Ye twilight elves who people solitude,
And are the undying children of dead hours,
My phanton self dwells with your glimmering host,
Charmed from night's envious brood;
Ye crown my days with amaranthine flowers,
And I live on, in ghostly lands a ghost.

II

I pass into the fairyland of dream,
As one might pass into the world we see
Deep in lone woodland pool or quiet stream,
With tenderer skies and mellower greenery.
I tread the mossy silence of dim ways
Where sunshine, through the leaves of long ago,
Haunts the still glades, and holds in solemn trance
Long aisles where bygone days
Whisper their tales, and memory's afterglow
Clothes my grey past in splendour of romance.

III

Ah! do ye live in me, or I in you,
Memories, that bring me in your phantom hands
A sound, a sense, an odour, or a hue;

As though the past, eternal in the sands
Fallen from Time's glass, and even as they fell,
Caught by Death's angel in his hallowing urn,
Were garnered there without decay or stain?
The day wherein we dwell,
Fled with life's pageant, never to return,
Is it a dream that may be dreamed again?

IV

The sweet remembered fragrance of a rose,
Long withered, in a garden ruined long,
Breathes round me—lo! the cloudy gates unclose!
I am there again, and hear the blackbird's song
In life's glad morn: a crushed geranium-leaf
Sheds balm, and through the old house that stands no more
I move, with beating heart, from room to room;
And where the eyes of grief
Looked in Death's eyes, meet those I loved of yore,
Truants from time and change, as from the tomb.

V

The self within us burns, a lonely star,
And knows not its own form, sees not its light,
Save mirrored in the shapes passing afar
From birth to death o'er the abyss of night,

Finding itself in that reflected beam
Which kindles in the House of Memory
Her pale phosphoric flame. And round that flame,
Moths in her lantern's gleam,
Appear the ghostly train of things that die,
Yet piteously awhile evade Death's claim.

VI

As feathers shaken from the wings of Time
Seem the pale memories whereby we live;
Lingering awhile, then melting like the rime.
The self we know as frail and fugitive.
But in God's House weaves Mother Memory
After Death's feet the web of life anew,
Creation's dream lives in her arras bright;
Where her swift shuttles fly
God shines eternal in each drop of dew,
All moments live immortal in His sight.