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LAKE NEMI

THE MIRROR OF DIANA

(Popular Name for Lake Nemi)

SHE floats into the quiet skies,
Where, in the circle of the hills,
Her immemorial mirror fills
With light, as of a Virgin's eyes
When, love a-tremble in their blue,
They glow twin violets dipped in dew.

Mild as a metaphor of Sleep,
Immaculately maiden-white,

The Queen Moon of ancestral night
Beholds her image in the deep:

As if a-gaze she beams above
Lake Nemi's magic glass of love.

White rose, white lily of the vale,
Perfume the even breath of night;
In many a burst of sweet delight
The love throb of the nightingale

Swells through lush flowering' woods and fills
The circle of the listening hills,

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,
The light of glow-worms and the fires
Of fire-flies in the cypress spires;
And all the wild wind instruments
Of pine and ilex as the breeze
Sweeps out their mystic harmonies;—

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!
Far, far above life's narrow pale,
O Unattainable! O Love!

Even as the nightingale we cry

For some Ideal set on high.

Haunting the deep reflective mind,

You may surprise its perfect Sphere
Glassed like the Moon within her mere,

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
Than in thy depths, romantic Tivoli!

Here, where the spirit of past ages dwells,
Lulled by the waters' voice of prophecy,
Endiademed with craggy majesty,

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,
Conscious of faded hues and felt decline,

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,
Calling, calling,

The wind goes

Through the seeding grass

And the tall corn.

What calleth the wind,
Passing by-

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.

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