No More Learning

I chose a book to read and dream:
Yet half the while with furtive eyes
Marked how she made her choice of flowers
Intuitively wise,

And ranged them with instinctive taste
Which all my books had failed to teach;
Fresh rose herself, and daintier
Than blossom of the peach.

By birthright higher than myself,
Though nestling of the self-same nest:
No fault of hers, no fault of mine,
But stubborn to digest.

I watched her, till my book unmarked
Slid noiseless to the velvet floor;
Till all the opulent summer-world
Looked poorer than before.

Just then her busy fingers ceased,
Her fluttered colour went and came:
I knew whose step was on the walk,
Whose voice would name her name.

* * * * *

Well, twenty years have passed since then:
My sister now, a stately wife
Still fair, looks back in peace and sees
The longer half of life--

The longer half of prosperous life,
With little grief, or fear, or fret:
She, loved and loving long ago,
Is loved and loving yet.

A husband honourable, brave,
Is her main wealth in all the world:
And next to him one like herself,
One daughter golden-curled:

Fair image of her own fair youth,
As beautiful and as serene,
With almost such another love
As her own love has been.

Yet, though of world-wide charity,
And in her home most tender dove,
Her treasure and her heart are stored
In the home-land of love.

She thrives, God's blessed husbandry;
Most like a vine which full of fruit
Doth cling and lean and climb toward heaven,
While earth still binds its root.

I sit and watch my sister's face:
How little altered since the hours
When she, a kind, light-hearted girl,
Gathered her garden flowers:

Her song just mellowed by regret
For having teased me with her talk;
Then all-forgetful as she heard
One step upon the walk.

While I? I sat alone and watched;
My lot in life, to live alone
In mine own world of interests,
Much felt, but little shown.

Not to be first: how hard to learn
That lifelong lesson of the past;
Line graven on line and stroke on stroke:
But, thank God, learned at last.

So now in patience I possess
My soul year after tedious year,
Content to take the lowest place,
The place assigned me here.

Yet sometimes, when I feel my strength
Most weak, and life most burdensome,
I lift mine eyes up to the hills
From whence my help shall come:

Yea, sometimes still I lift my heart
To the Archangelic trumpet-burst,
When all deep secrets shall be shown,
And many last be first.



DEAD HOPE.
Hope new born one pleasant morn
Died at even;
Hope dead lives nevermore,
No, not in heaven.

If his shroud were but a cloud
To weep itself away;
Or were he buried underground
To sprout some day!
But dead and gone is dead and gone
Vainly wept upon.

Nought we place above his face
To mark the spot,
But it shows a barren place
In our lot.



A DAUGHTER OF EVE.


A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warmed sweet to-morrow:--
Stripped bare of hope and every thing,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.



VENUS' LOOKING-GLASS.


I marked where lovely Venus and her court
With song and dance and merry laugh went by;
Weightless, their wingless feet seemed made to fly,
Bound from the ground and in mid air to sport.
Left far behind I heard the dolphins snort,
Tracking their goddess with a wistful eye,
Around whose head white doves rose, wheeling high
Or low, and cooed after their tender sort.
All this I saw in spring. Through summer heat
I saw the lovely Queen of Love no more.
But when flushed autumn through the woodlands went
I spied sweet Venus walk amid the wheat:
Whom seeing, every harvester gave o'er
His toil, and laughed and hoped and was content.



LOVE LIES BLEEDING.


Love that is dead and buried, yesterday
Out of his grave rose up before my face,
No recognition in his look, no trace
Of memory in his eyes dust-dimmed and grey.