ROSALIE.
125
Now blushed into full beauty. There was one
Whom she loved tenderly in days now gone!
She was not dancing gaily with the rest:
A rose-cheeked child within her arms was prest;
And it had twined its small hands in the hair
That clustered o'er its mother's brow: as fair
As buds in spring. She gave her laughing dove
To one who clasped it with a father's love;
And if a painter's eye had sought a scene
Of love in its most perfect loveliness—
Of childhood, and of wedded happiness,—
He would have painted the sweet Madeline!
But Rosalie shrank from them, and she strayed
Through a small grove of cypresses, whose shade
Hung o'er a burying-ground, where the low stone
And the gray cross recorded those now gone!
