BEAUTY like hers is genius. Not the call Of Homer's or of Dante's heart sublime,

Not Michael's hand furrowing the zones of time,

Is more with compassed mysteries musical;

Nay, not in Spring's or Summer's sweet footfall

More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeathes

Than doth this sovereign face, whose love-spell breathes

Even from its shadowed contour on the wall.

As many men are poets in their youth, But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong

Even through all change the indomitable song;

So in like wise the envenomed years, whose tooth

Rends shallower grace with ruin void of ruth,

Upon this beauty's power shall wreak

no wrong.

XIX. SILENT NOON

YOUR hands lie open in the long, fresh grass,

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and

amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can

pass,

SWEET dimness of her loosened hair's downfall

About thy face; her sweet hands round thy head

In gracious fostering union garlanded; Her tremulous smiles; her glances' sweet recall

Of love; her murmuring sighs memorial;

Her mouth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed

On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led

Back to her mouth, which answers there for all:

What sweeter than these things, except the thing

In lacking which all these would lose their sweet :

The confident heart's still fervor: the swift beat

And soft subsidence of the spirit's wing,

Then when it feels, in cloud-girt way

faring.

The breath of kindred plumes against its feet?

XXIV. PRIDE OF YOUTH

EVEN as a child, of sorrow that we give The dead, but little in his heart can find,

Since without need of thought to his clear mind

Their turn it is to die and his to live :Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive

THOU lovely and beloved, thou my love; Whose kiss seems still the first; whose summoning eyes,

Even now, as for our love-world's new sunrise,

Shed very dawn; whose voice, attuned above

All modulation of the deep-bowered dove,

Is like a hand laid softly on the soul; Whose hand is like a sweet voice to control

Those worn tired brows it hath the keeping of :

What word can answer to thy wordwhat gaze

To thine, which now absorbs within its sphere

My worshipping face, till I am mirrored there

Light-circled in a heaven of deep-drawn rays?

What clasp, what kiss mine inmost heart can prove,

O lovely and beloved, O my love?

XXVII. HEART'S COMPASS SOMETIMES thou seem'st not as thyself alone,

But as the meaning of all things that

are;

A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar

Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;

Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;

Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,

Being of its furthest fires oracular — The evident heart of all life sown and

mown.