Classic Poem

Like a flower in the mist of the moorland, spectral, shadowy,
Is she the girl of my dreamings, simple and fawn-like shy;
Hers the ethereal radiance of heavenly groves and streams;
Such as the painter pictures, such as the poet dreams.

Out in the open spaces she beckons my spirit on,
She that is born of evening, and fades in the lilac dawn.
She comes from the ports of the flaxen moon on one of the spirit ships,
Her tresses are night's abysses, the red rose gleams on her lips,
Through the soft, impalpable ether she has ordered her ship to go,
By Peristan of the musk-winds, where snow-white spice flowers blow;
On the manes of the crooning breezes, by fairy lands untold,
She comes in the guise of a mortal, who never groweth old;
Through the tangle of gossamer silver the bow of her vessel cleaves,
And the moonlight opens before it with a rustle of willow leaves,
Down to the fringe of the moorland where the land and the heavens meet,
Where the quivering bloom of the heather presses to kiss her feet,
Prankt in a robe of star-mist tinged with its many dyes.
And I watch as a lover watches till the transient vision flies—
The mystic girl of my dreamings, simple and fawn-like shy,
The flower in the mist of the moorland, lonesome and shadowy.