The pale blue sky gleams through the opening leaves,
The shadows play across the ground and air,
The yellow sunlight round leaf-rims retrieves
Its vanquished splendor where the foliage fair
Shuts out the grass from its fierce pulse and care.

I hear the silence from my window seat,
And feel the summer entering my veins,
And know with what strange joys the hour-hearts beat,
The fervorous hours that dance the fleeting plains
Where Love has birth and sweetest Joy remains.

I see across the way the maid I love,

Long in her tower had languished Danaë,
Fast caged by massive heavy-bolted doors,
And guarded safe by savage-baying hounds
From midnight lovers' vows:

But Jupiter and Venus laughed to scorn
The anxious jailer of the hidden maid,
Acrisius,—for the quest would easy prove
To gold-disguised god.

Through armèd guards gold loves to thread its way,
And stronger than the thunder-bolt, break through
Thick walls of rock. The Argive augur's house
For love of lucre fell,

In ruin plunged; the man of Macedon
Cleft city-gates and undermined the power

I ASKED of Night, that she would take me
—Where I could not go by day.
I asked of Day, he should not wake me
—Ere the sun was on his way;

For as the sun steals from the flowers
—The crystal dew by which they live,
He kills the memory of those hours
—Which Night, for my delight, will give.

Still may the soft susurrus of the bee
Linger, and still the cushat's musical coo;
But will those eyes of strange celestial blue
Look love and peace and pardon upon me?
Home I return; soon is the story told—
Waiting behind the garden-gate stands Marigold.

There came a dream to me. 'Twas Marigold!
O the blue loving eyes and golden coil
Of silk-soft hair! Amid the town's turmoil
Vivid the vision of that garden old
Where bloomed the flower of love; for all men know
Only the flower of love can through all calends blow.

I drained the tankard to the very dregs,
Leaving no sign of supernaculum,
Then gazing on myself, with shame grew dumb,
As the epicure who loves his plovers' eggs
If he should see a lapwing. Men continue
To spend their strongest years in waste of soul and sinew.

You know, Cæcilius, all the dreariness
Of prolix fools' political debate—
All the fierce fret and fever, heat and hate,
Which upon sensitive brains bring strenuous stress
Of torture; all the wicked wild reaction,
Demonaic disgust, and deep dissatisfaction.

But far away in Megalopolis
There was grave work to do, and after grave
Work the excited brain in lymph to lave—
Which very strong for good and evil is—
Lymph of full pleasure (woman, wit, and wine),
Which tempts the demigod to deem himself divine.

When Summer brooded on her garden-plot,
How lazily the brooklet's wave slipped by!
The cooing doves made sleepy melody,
The bees grew drowsy in their melilot,
The burnt-out odour of magnolia bloom
Came stealing through the arcades to love's own darkened room.

And all her fresh flusht face was smitten through
With fervent colour, such as sunlight burns
Into delicious depths of blossom-urns:
But then her eyes were of strange sapphire-blue,
Or that which men have seen in early skies
Ere Phosphor in the abyss of perfect purple dies.