(_For the Mirror._)
It was a custom in my time to look through a handkerchief at the new year's
moon, and as many moons as ye saw (multiplied by the handkerchief,) so
many years would ye be before ye were wed.
When sunset and moon-rise
Chill and burn at once on the earth--
When love-tears and love-sighs
Tickle up boisterous mirth--
When fate-stars are shooting,
Sparks of love to the maid
To fill her funeral eye with light,
And owlets are hooting
Her sire's ghost, which she's unlaid
With vexation, down backward in night;
Then the lover may spin from that light of her eye,
(As through his sigh it glances silkily,)
With the wheel of a dead witch's fancy,
The thread of his after destiny--
All hidden things to prove.
Then make a warp and a woof of that thread of sight,
And weave it with loom of a fairy sprite,
As she works by the lamp of the glow-worm's light,
While it lays drunk with the dew-drop of night,
And ye'll have the _kerchief_ of love:
Then peep through it at the waning moon,
And ye shall read your fate--anon.
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