Classic Poem

Beautiful Summer is over,
Season of days elysian!
And the months of birds, and bees and clover,
Have passed like a lovely vision;
And like swallows have flitted the revelers gay,
The careless, butterfly throng,
That filled the long, voluptuous day
With laughter and with song.

The banquet halls are forsaken,
And dead are the festal torches;
And by the chill wind downward shaken,
The rose-leaves drift in the porches,
And gone are the waltzers like the wind,
With the weal or woe of each;
And like a ghost that is left behind,
I haunt the lonely beach.

The fields are fading and dying,
The skies grow gray and sober;
And through the rifled groves is sighing
The solemn and sere October.
Under the silent stars at night,
I walk, a beggar, alone;
But the moonlit strand and the great delight
Of the sea, is all my own!

For me no stale romancing,
Under the gas-jets' glimmer;
But to watch the rippled wavelets dancing
In the sunset's golden shimmer!
And the lonely sea-gull knows my form,
As I walk by the rolling wave,
And his jubilant scream from the flying storm,
Is the voice of a comrade brave!

Ah well! it is quickly ended,
Flushed Fashion's hot campaign —
The brief, bright term of mockery splendid,
Of passion mixed with pain.
But " Faites votre jeu messieurs ! "
I laugh, having been of the great;
But to me the scene as a play appears,
And ye as the puppets of Fate!

Brief is the season of laughter,
What time Remorse is sleeping;
But black-robed Sorrow cometh after,
Wan with over-weeping.
After the giddy whirl and strife,
Space for a soberer breath;
After the masquerade of life,
Weariness, dirges, and death!