admire and love,
And still their chalices are beautiful above
The stems they rest upon.

You wander mid the borders here and there
Along a lonely path,
And the flowers you bear
Tremble in your hand that shudders as it takes.
And now your dreamy fingers
Reverently shape the sere
Roses wherein autumn lingers,
Weaving them with many a tear,
Into a crown of pale, clear flakes.

The last light dwells upon your eyes and brow
And your slow steps are sad and quiet now....

Slowly, at the vesper, through the gloam,
With empty hands you wandered home,
Leaving, upon a little humid mound,
On the path that to our doorway led,
The pale circlet that your fingers bound.
And I knew that in our garden perished,
Where winds now pass like cohorts over-head,
You would give flower again for one last time,
To our youth that lies upon the ground
Dead....




VIII


When you store away in fragrant shelves,
Some autumn eve, the fruits of orchard trees,
I seem to see you calmly ranging there
Our old, but fresh and perfumed memories.

And love returns for them as once they were,
The wind on lips and sunlight in my eyes;
I see the vanished moments once again,
Their joy, their mirth, their fevers and their cries.

The past comes back to life with such desire
To be the present with its force again,
That half-extinct fires burn with sudden flame,
My heart exults and swoons as though in pain.

Oh fruits that glow amid the autumn shadows,
Jewels fallen from the summer's string
Of gems, illumining our sombre hours,
What red awakening is this you bring!




IX


Fallen is the leafage from above
That covered all the garden with its shade;
See, between the naked boughs far off
The village roofs to the horizon fade.

While summer flamed its joy, neither of us
Saw them clustered there so near our home;
But to-day, with leaf and flower dead,
Into our thinking they more often come.

Others are living there behind those walls
And those worn thresholds with the porch above,
Having for only friends the wind and rain
And the lighted lamp to give them love.

In the fall of eve, when fires are lit,
And the pauses of the clock they heed,
Dear, as to us, the silence is to them,
The thoughts within their eyes that they may read.

Those hours of intimacy naught disturbs,
Of tender and profound tranquillity,
Blessing the instant past for having been
And finding dearer yet the one to be.

See how they hold between their trembling hands
A happiness of pain and pleasure born;
Known to each the other's body old
And aged eyes by the same sorrows worn.

The flowers of their life, they love them faded,
The final perfume and the beauty brief,
And heavy memory of glory waning,
Wasting in time's garden, leaf by leaf.

Deep in their warmth of human feeling hid,
From the winter sheltered and reduse,
Nothing abases them or makes them pine
And plead for days they are content to lose.

The quiet folk of those old villages,
What neighbours are they to our happiness!
And how