XIX.

To us, us also open straight!

The outer life is chilly

Are we, too, like the earth, to wait
Till next year for our Lily?

XX.

-Oh, my own baby on my knees,
My leaping, dimpled treasure,-
At every word I write like these,
Clasped close, with stronger pressure!

XXI.

Too well my own heart understands . . .
At every word, beats fuller...

My little feet, my little hands,

And hair of Lily's colour!

XXII.

-But God gives patience, Love learns strength,

And Faith remembers promise;

And Hope itself can smile at length

On other hopes gone from us.

XXIII.

Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death,

Through struggle, made more glorious: This mother stills her sobbing breath,

Renouncing, yet victorious.

XXIV.

Arms, empty of her child, she lifts,
With spirit unbereaven-

"God will not all take back His gifts:
My Lily's mine in Heaven!

XXV.

"Still mine!-maternal rights serene
Not given to another!

The crystal bars shine faint between
The souls of child and mother.

XXVI.

66

Meanwhile," the mother cries, "content!
Our love was well divided;

Its sweetness following where she went,
Its anguish stayed where I did.

XXVII.

"Well done of God, to halve the lot,
And give her all the sweetness!
To us, the empty room and cot,—
To her, the Heaven's completeness:

XXVIII.

"To us, this grave-to her, the rows
The mystic palm-trees spring in:
To us, the silence in the house,—
To her, the choral singing!

XXIX.

"For her, to gladden in God's view,-
For us, to hope and bear on !—
Grow, Lily, in thy garden new,
Beside the Rose of Sharon.

XXX.

"Grow fast in Heaven, sweet Lily clipped,
In love more calm than this is,—
And may the angels dewy-lipped
Remind thee of our kisses!

XXXI.

"While none shall tell thee of our tears, These human tears now falling;

Till, after a few patient years,

One home shall take us all in;

XXXI.

"Child, father, mother-who, left out?
Not mother, and not father!-
And when, their dying couch about,
The natural mists shall gather,

XXXIII.

"Some smiling angel close shall stand, In old Correggio's fashion,

Bearing a LILY in his hand,

For death's ANNUNCIATION."

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.

I

I.

THOUGHT once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,

Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove, .
"Guess now who holds thee?"-"Death!" I said.

But, there,

The silver answer rang.. "Not Death, but Love."

II.

BUT only three in all God's universe

Have heard this word thou hast said; Himself, beside
Thee speaking and me listening! and replied
One of us.. that was God! . . and laid the curse

So darkly on my eyelids as to amerce

My sight from seeing thee,—that if I had died,
The deathweights, placed there, would have signified
Less absolute exclusion. "Nay" is worse
From God than from all others, O my friend!
Men could not part us with their worldly jars,
Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend:
Our hands would touch, for all the mountain-bars ;-
And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,
We should but vow the faster for the stars.

III.

UNLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses, and our destinies.

Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart

Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes

Than tears, even, can make mine, to ply thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do

With looking from the lattice-lights at me,

A poor, tired, wandering singer?.. singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head,-on mine, the dew,—
And Death must dig the level where these agree.