And now the spirit goes,

In her breast the snow-white rose.
When hark! a voice that calls
Within the garden walls:

"Thou didst choose the better part,

Thou hast won the Gentle Heart
Lo, now to thee is given

The red rose of Heaven."

A WOMAN'S THOUGHT

-

I AM a woman therefore I may not

Call to him, cry to him,

Fly to him,

Bid him delay not!

Then when he comes to me, I must sit quiet;

Still as a stone

All silent and cold.

If my heart riot

Crush and defy it!
Should I grow bold,

Say one dear thing to him,
All my life fling to him,
Cling to him-

What to atone

Is enough for my sinning!
This were the cost to me,
This were my winning-
That he were lost to me.

THE RIVER INN

Not as a lover

At last if he part from me,
Tearing my heart from me,
Hurt beyond cure

Calm and demure
Then must I hold me,
In myself fold me,
Lest he discover;
Showing no sign to him
By look of mine to him
What he has been to me
How my heart turns to him,
Follows him, yearns to him,
Prays him to love me.

Pity me, lean to me,

Thou God above me!

THE RIVER INN

THE night was black and drear

Of the last day of the year.

Two guests to the river inn

Came, from the wide world's bound

One with clangor and din,

The other without a sound.

"Now hurry, servants and host!

Get the best that your cellars boast.
White be the sheets and fine,
And the fire on the hearthstone bright;
Pile the wood, and spare not the wine,
And call him at morning-light."

99

"But where is the silent guest?
In what chamber shall she rest?
In this! Should she not go higher?
"T is damp, and the fire is gone."

"You need not kindle the fire,

You need not call her at dawn."

Next morn he sallied forth

On his journey to the North.

O, bright the sunlight shone

Through boughs that the breezes stir;

But for her was lifted a stone

Under the churchyard fir.

THE HOMESTEAD

I

HERE stays the house, here stay the selfsame places, Here the white lilacs and the buttonwoods;

Here the dark pine-groves, there the river-floods,
And there the threading brook that interlaces
Green meadow-bank with meadow-bank the same.
The melancholy nightly chorus came

Long, long ago from the same pool, and yonder
Stark poplars lift in the same twilight air
Their ancient lonelinesses; nearer, fonder,

The black-heart cherry-tree's gaunt branches bare
Rasp on the same old window where I ponder.

II

And we, the only living, only pass;

We come and go, whither and whence we know not. From birth to bound the same house keeps, alas! New lives as gently as the old; there show not

AT FOUR SCORE

ΙΟΙ

Among the haunts that each had thought his own
The looks that partings bring to human faces.
The black-heart there, that heard my earliest moan,
And yet shall hear my last, like all these places
I love so well, unloving lives from child

To child; from morning joy to evening sorrow
Untouched by joy, by anguish undefiled;
All one the generations gone, and new;

All one dark yesterday and bright to-morrow;
To the old tree's insensate sympathy

All one the morning and the evening dew
My far, forgotten ancestor and I.

AT FOUR SCORE

THIS is the house she was born in, full four-score years

ago,

And here she is living still, bowed and ailing, but clinging Still to this wonted life like an ancient and blasted oak

tree,

Whose dying roots yet clasp the earth with an iron hold.

This is the house she was born in, and yonder across the

bay

Is the home her lover builded, for her and for him and their children;

Daily she watched it grow, from dawn to the evening twilight,

As it rose on the orchard hill, 'mid the springtime showers and bloom.

There is the village church, its steeple over the trees Rises and shows the clock she has watched since the day it was started

O, many a year ago, how many she cannot remember. Now solemnly over the water rings out the evening hour.

And there in that very church, tho', alas, how bedizened, and changed!

They've painted it up, she says, in their queer, new, modern fashion,

There on a morning in June, she gave her hand to her husband;

Her heart it was his (she told him) long years and years

before.

Now here she sits at the window, gazing out on steeple

and hill;

All but the houses are gone, the church, and the trees,

and the houses;

All, all have gone long since, parents, and husband, and children;

And herself

she thinks, at times, she too has vanished

and gone.

No, it cannot be she who stood in the church that morning in June,

Nor she who felt at her breast the lips of a child in the

darkness;

But hark in the gathering dusk comes a low, quick moan of anguish

Ah, it is she indeed, who has lived, who has loved, and

lost.

For she thinks of a wintry night, when her last was taken

away,

Forty years this very month, the last, the fairest, the

dearest;