Page:Poems of Sentiment and Imagination.djvu/257

---

O beautiful as light! and brave and tender!
Come back—come back to me! my soul doth cry;
But no reply thy distant soul doth render,
And time creeps onward slowly, wearily.

Now all the sky in radiant beauty blushes—
The golden sun woos the soft-swelling sea—
The west grows crimson and the far east flushes—
Oped are the portals of Eternity!
And this June day, her golden tresses streaming.
Her fair face and bright glances backward cast.
Her garments floating and her forehead beaming.
Steps through the gorgeous gate to wed the Past.

Twilight is here; and now begins the throbbing.
Wild, and no more subdued, of my dark heart;
The shadowy stillness listens to my sobbing.
Broken, and faint, and bitter; hot tears start
Large, slow, and fiery, from their founts unbidden,
And anguish frets and fevers my bent brow;
The language of my grief, from daylight hidden,
Finds its own utterance and expression now.

O there is something soothing in the splendor
Of the calm, shining, and most holy stars!
To me they ever have been true and tender.
Leaning from out their silver-sparkling cars,
To smile upon me in my moods of madness,
To hush my troubled thoughts and trance my tears.
To turn my anguish into softer sadness.
And fill me with sweet hopes in place of fears.

I sob no more, but sit and mark them stealing
From their blue-draperied chambers in the sky—
The many and the many still revealing
Their placid foreheads from their homes on high;