AN INTERLUDE.

Your feet in the full-grown grasses

Moved soft as a weak wind blows;

You passed me as April passes,

With face made out of a rose.

By the stream where the stems were slender,

Your light foot paused at the sedge;

It might be to watch the tender

Light leaves in the spring-time hedge,

On boughs that the sweet month blanches
With flowery frost of May;

It might be a bird in the branches,

It might be a thorn in the way.

I waited to watch you linger,

With foot drawn back from the dew,

Till a sunbeam straight like a finger

Struck sharp through the leaves at you.

AN INTERLUDE.

And a bird overhead sang "Follow,"

And a bird to the right sang "Here," And the arch of the leaves was hollow, And the meaning of May was clear.

I saw where the sun's hand pointed,

I knew what the bird's note said;

By the dawn and the dewfall anointed,

You were queen by the gold on your head.

As the glimpse of a burnt-out ember
Recalls a regret of the sun,

I remember, forget, and remember
What love saw done and undone.

I remember the way we parted,

The day and the way we met;

You hoped we were both broken-hearted,

And knew we should both forget.

AN INTERLUDE.

And May with her world in flower

Seemed still to murmur and smile

As you murmured and smiled for an hour;
I saw you twice at the stile.

A hand like a white-wood blossom
You lifted, and waved and passed,
With head hung down to the bosom,
And pale, as it seemed, to the last.

And the best and the worst of this is,

That neither is most to blame,

If you've forgotton my kisses,

And I've forgotten your name.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

338

ON AN INTAGLIO HEAD OF MINERVA.

HE cunning hand that carved this face,

THE

A little helmeted Minerva

The hand, I say, ere Phidias wrought,

Had lost its subtle skill and fervor.

Who was he? Was he glad or sad?

Who knew to carve in such a fashion?

Perchance he shaped this dainty head

For some brown girl that scorned his passion.

But he is dust; we may not know

His happy or unhappy story:

Nameless and dead these thousand years,
His work outlives him--there's his glory!

Both man and jewel lay in earth

Beneath a lava-buried city;

The thousand summers came and went,

With neither haste, nor hate, nor pity.

ON AN INTAGLIO,

The years wiped out the man, but left

The jewel fresh as any blossom.

Till some Visconti dug it up,

To rise and fall on Mabel's bosom.

O Roman brother! See how Time

Your gracious handiwork has guarded;

See how your loving, patient art

Has come, at last, to be rewarded.

Who would not suffer slights of men,

And pangs of hopeless passion also,

To have his carven agate-stone

On such a bosom rise and fall so!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

340