AN EMBER PICTURE. OW strange are the freaks of memory! How The lessons of life we forget, While a trifle, a trick of color, In the wonderful web is set, Set by some mordant of fancy, A chance had brought us together; We spoke of French acting and actors, Of the weather, for it was raining We debated the social nothings Arrived at her door, we left her With a drippingly hurried adieu, And our wheels went crunching the gravel Of the oak-darkened avenue. As we drove away through the shadow, From rain-varnished tree-trunk to tree-trunk Flashed fainter, then wholly faded. Before we had passed the wood; But the light of the face behind it Went with me and stayed for good. The vision of scarce a moment, And hardly marked at the time, It comes unbidden to haunt me, Had she beauty? Well, not what they call so; And yet there's her face in my memory As I sit sometimes in the twilight, And call back to life in the coals Old faces and hopes and fancies Long buried, (good rest to their souls!) Her face shines out in the embers; And hear the crunch of the gravel "T is a face that can never grow older, TO H. W. L., I ON HIS BIRTHDAY, 27TH FEBRUARY, 1867. NEED not praise the sweetness of his song, Where limpid verse to limpid verse succeeds Smooth as our Charles, when, fearing lest he wrong The new moon's mirrored skiff, he slides along, Full without noise, and whispers in his reeds. With loving breath of all the winds his name As I muse backward up the checkered years Wherein so much was given, so much was lost, Blessings in both kinds, such as cheapen tears,— But hush! this is not for profaner ears; Let them drink molten pearls nor dream the cost. Some suck up poison from a sorrow's core, As naught but nightshade grew upon earth's ground; Love turned all his to heart's-case, and the more Fate tried his bastions, she but forced a door Leading to sweeter manhood and more sound. Even as a wind-waved fountain's swaying shade A heart of sunshine that would fain o'errun. Surely if skill in song the shears may stay Whose choicest verse is harsher-toned than hel |