Perchance a lurking breeze
Springs, just awakened to its wayward play,
Tossing the sober trees
Into a frolic maze of ecstasies,
And snatching at the gay
Banners of Autumn, strews them where it please.
The sunset colors glow
A second time in flame from out the wood,
As bright and warm as though
The vanished clouds had fallen, and lodged below
Among the tree-tops, hued
With all the colors of heaven's signal-bow.
The fitful breezes die
Into a gentle whisper, and then sleep;
And sweetly, mournfully,
Starting to sight, in the transparent sky,
Lone in the upper deep,
Sad Hesper pours its beams upon the eye;
And for one little hour,
Holds audience with the lesser lights of heaven;
Then to its western bower
Descends in sudden darkness, as the flower
That at the fall of Even
Shuts its bright eye, and yields to slumber's power.
Soon, with a dusky face,
Pensive and proud as an East Indian queen,
And with a solemn grace,
The moon ascends, and takes her royal place
In the fair evening scene;
While all the reverential stars, apace,
Take up their march through the cool fields of space,
And dead is the sweet Autumn day whose close we've seen.
