If she would come, now, and say, _What will you Lover?_--
She who has the fairest gifts of all the earth to give--
Think you I should ask some tremendous thing to prove her,
Her life, say, and all her love, so long as she might live?
Should I touch her hair? her hands? her garments, even?
Nay! for such rewards the gods their own good time have set!
Once, these were _all_ mine: the least, poor one was heaven:
Now, lest she remember, I pray that she forget.
Merely should I ask--ah! she would not refuse them
Who still seems very kind when I meet with her in dreams--
Only three of our old days, and--should she help to choose them
Would the first not be in April, beside the sudden
streams?......
Once, upon a morning, up the path that we had taken,
We saw Spring come where the willow-buds are grey;
Heard the high hills, as with tread of armies, shaken;
Felt the strong sun--O, the glory of that day!
And then--what? one afternoon of quiet summer weather
O, woodlands and meadow-lands along the blue St. John,
My birch finds a path--though your rafts lie close together--
Then O! what starry miles before the grey o' the dawn!........
I have met the new day, among the misty islands,
Come with whine of saw-mills and whirr of hidden wings,
Gleam of dewy cobwebs, smell of grassy highlands.--
Ah! the blood grows young again thinking of these things.
Then, last and best of all! Though all else were found hollow
Would Time not send a little space, before the Autumn's close,
And lead us up the road--the old road we used to follow
Among the sunset hills till the Hunter's Moon arise?......
Then, Home through the poplar-wood! damp across our faces
The grey leaves that fall, the moths that flutter by:
Yea! this for me, now, of all old hours and places,
To keep when I am dead, Time, until she come to die.