LAKE NEMI THE MIRROR OF DIANA (Popular Name for Lake Nemi) SHE floats into the quiet skies, Mild as a metaphor of Sleep, The Queen Moon of ancestral night As if a-gaze she beams above White rose, white lily of the vale, Swells through lush flowering' woods and fills White rose, white lily of the skies, The Moon-flower blossoms in the lake; The nightingale for her fair sake With hopeless love's impassioned cries Seems fain to sing till song must kill Himself with one tumultuous trill. And all the songs and all the scents, All are but Messengers of May To that white orb of maiden fire Who fills the moth with mad desire To die enamoured in her ray, And turns each dewdrop in the grass nto a fairy looking-glass. O Beauty, far and far above The night moth and the nightingale! Even as the nightingale we cry For some Ideal set on high. Haunting the deep reflective mind, You may surprise its perfect Sphere Who at a puff of alien wind Melts in innumerable rings, Elusive in the flux of things. MATHILDE BLIND. TIVOLI TIVOLI AND where breathes Nature deeper oracles Here, where the spirit of past ages dwells, And plumed with woods that shed a horror round? From the deep olive grove lift up thine eye; Lo, on yon airy cliff's extremest bound The Sibyl's temple reared against the blue profound; Where the wrecked image of the beautiful, Looks down on eloquence that doth o'errule The heart far more than language, though divine Were he who spake; full swells the flowing line Of light and delicate proportion there; Time's grey tints mellowing that ruined shrine, Impart a speaking sadness to its air, A venerable grace that doth his wrongs repair. JOHN EDMUND READE. RED POPPIES IN THE SABINE VALLEYS NEAR ROME THROUGH the seeding grass, And the tall corn, The wind goes: With nimble feet, And blithe voice, The wind goes Through the seeding grass And the tall corn. What calleth the wind, The shepherd-wind? Far and near He laugheth low, And the red poppies Lift their heads And toss i' the sun. A thousand thousand blooms Tossed i' the air, Banners of joy, For 't is the shepherd-wind Passing by, Singing and laughing low Through the seeding grass And the tall corn. WILLIAM SHARP. |