The sweetest hour in all love's wond'rous story, When Hope first whispers of the coming glory.
A SUDDEN strange unfolding
In the cheerful noontide glare;
A sudden passionate heaving
In the bosom of the air.
The sense of something coming,
Mysterious and dread,
The lightning for its crowning,
The thunder for its tread.
A whisper in the breezes
One has not heard before;
A longing in the billow,
A yearning in the shore.
A bubbling up of life
From every wayside thing; A meaning in the dip
Of even a swallow's wing.
A fear as if the morrow
Would ope some hidden portal; A joy as if the feet
Stood at the gate immortal.
An angel in the pathway To every common goal, A widening of the outlook That opens on the soul.
A sound of song at midnight,
A mist of dreams at noon;
A tear upon the eyelash,
The lips' smile might impugn.
A coming back of childhood
When morning suns are bright,
To find yourself a woman
Upon your knees at night.
Play on! Play on! As higher rise
The lifted strains, I seem, I seem To mount, to mount through roseate skies, Through drifted cloud and golden gleam, To realms, to realms of thought and fire, Where angels walk and souls aspire, And sorrow comes but as the night That brings a star for our delight.
Play on! Play on! The spirit fails,
The star grows dim, the glory pales,
The depths are roused - the depths, and oh!
The heart that wakes, the hopes that glow!
The depths are roused: their billows call
The soul from heights to slip and fall;
To slip and fall and faint and be
Made part of their immensity;
To slip from Heaven; to fall and find
In love the only perfect mind;
To slip and fall and faint and be
Lost, drowned within this melody,
As life is lost and thought in thee.
Ah, sweet, art thou the star, the star
That draws my soul afar, afar?
Thy voice the silvery tide on which
I float to islands rare and rich?
Thy love the ocean, deep and strong,
In which my hopes and being long
To sink and faint and fail away?
I cannot know. I cannot say.
But play, play on.
Doth need no pedigree to make it lovely. Risifi's Daughter, p. 11.
Life is no plain, however vast or varied,
But rising ground, where every forward step
Shifts the horizon.
AT THE PIANO.
PLAY on! Play on! As softly glides
The low refrain, I seem, I seem
To float, to float on golden tides,
By sunlit isles, where life and dream Are one, are one; and hope and bliss Move hand in hand, and thrilling, kiss
'Neath bowery blooms,
In twilight glooms,
And love is life, and life is love.
They who see her call her fair;
Say her smile pleases; that her voice is soft;
Her cheek the home of blushes, light, and joy;
Her glance a shifting glory; and her brow
The throne of beauty and the seat of truth,
But as for me, I can see naught of this.
I do not know if she be fair or not.
A blind man just restored to light, I ween,
Would scarcely stop in looking at a rose
To say that it was beautiful. I only know
Her glance is revelation, and her smile
A torturing delight. Her slightest move
Wakes rapture in me. When I look at her
I feel in that one instant all the reach
The human soul can scale in depth and height,
In ecstasy and pain; so much I love her.
It was a deadly blow! A blow like that
Which swooping unawares from out the night
Dashes a man from some high starlit peak
Into a void of cold and hurrying waves.
'Twas not the loss alone. In that wild hour
Of first resistance, anguish, and despair,
He felt he could have borne her simple loss
So God had taken her. But loss of love!
Loss of belief in all the radiant past,
Of hope in years to come-ah, who but those
Whose lives have felt the shock of utter wreck,
Can rightly speak of what that hour of doom
Was to this man of sorrow!
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