Classic Poem

For Miss E —

I SAW one pass along a marble frieze
That Time had shaken from a temple wall;
And moving maidens in processional
Followed or came before, but none of these
Turned such a face from the Hesperides,
Or stood, superb, like Greece before her fall,
Or went so proudly in the festival, —
Whither, — O goddess of the fallen frieze?

No garlands for the gods delight your hands,
No sacred fillets round your brow are pressed,
But you emerge from some forgotten gloom, —
Lonely in beauty like your twilight lands,
And lovelier than Helen when she blessed
An ancient city with a splendid doom.