If, loving you, I sometimes seem as sad
Or dull, or tinged with hint of sober mood,
It is because I feel my life renewed
Having your love; and still my treasures add
As misers do; and what of woe I've had
No more with its gaunt shadows may intrude;
Thus silence fills the happy interlude
While I sit wordless, worshiping, and glad.

A boy's love and a man's love intertwined
I give to you to govern all the time,
Whether it run to reason or to rhyme.
The passion and the purity combined;

Though love, like blisters made from leaves
Grown on Mount Ibuki,
Torments me more than I can say,
My lady shall not see,
How she is paining me.

My constancy to her I love
I never will forsake;
As surely as the Palace Guards
Each night their watch-fire make
And guard it till daybreak.

Is love the passion that the poets feign,
Drawn from the ruins of old Grecian time,
Born of the Hermae and all earthly slime,
And tricked by troubadours in trappings vain
Of flowers fantastic, like a Hindoo fane,
Or the long meter of an antique rhyme
Dancing in dactyls? Is love, then, a crime —
A rosy day's eternity of pain?

If we love God, we know what loving is;
For love is God's: He sent it to the earth,
Half-human, half-divine, all glorious —
Half-human, half-divine, but wholly His;
Not loving God, we know not true love's worth,

I dare not hope my lady-love
Will smile on me again;
She knows no pity, and my life
I care not to retain,
Since all my prayers are vain.

To fall in love with womankind
Is my unlucky fate;
If only it were otherwise,
I might appreciate
Some men, whom now I hate.

Not rhapsodies for what we cannot reach
Nor longing for what lies beyond our power,
But just to make life lovely as a flower
By gift of tenderness in thought and speech;
Thus rain and dew their loving lessons teach
In lace-like gleam or sudden-dropping shower
And so shall we, through every passing hour,
Hold fast to higher visions, each for each.

Fidelity and courtesy; and touch
Of hopefulness to meet the coming years,
And strength to view the days that backward roll, —
These will I give you, and in pledging such

Too short the lovely summer night,
Too soon 'tis passed away;
I watched to see behind which cloud
The moon would chance to stay,
And here's the dawn of day!

How beautiful she looks, opening the pearly casement,
And how quiet she leans, and how troubled her brow is!
You may see the tears now, bright on her cheek,
But not the man she so bitterly loves.

The youth beneath her balcon sings of love —
Old Shylock's gone: " O Jessica, come thou
Unto this heart which in one fervent vow
Has burned its flesh and blood! " The moments move
As days in Eden; she goes, like a dove,
From great St. Mark's at Venice, to endow
Her lover with her life. The rosy Now
Seems Heaven itself, and he the Lord thereof.
But love is rainbow-tinted, and as short
As is the life of rainbows. " Mine? Oh, nay! "
Say'st thou, fair Jessica, who maketh sport
Of that old Jew, thy father? In love's court