This moment I so careless threw away,
Tossed to the ages, with a spendthrift hand,
Little I recked the labour that had planned
This flash eternal of a Summer day;
├ćons of sequent toil had passed to pay
Wealth to the freighted instant. Slow and grand
Wavers a solemn dirge across the land,
One soul, in my lost moment, found a way
To throw the mock to Time, and call him slave.
And I--a pauper still--gaze wise at last
To all the grey horizon line of nought.
But from the heart I deemed an empty grave
Gleams forth like spark my precious gem of past
Shrined in the setting of a deathless thought.
THE COMING
OF LOVE
I dreamed that love came, as the oak trees grow,
By the chance dropping of a tiny seed;
And then from moon to moon with steady speed,
Tho' torn by winds and chilled with heedless snow,
The sap of pulsing life would upward flow,
'Till in its might the heavens themselves could read
Portents of power that they must learn to heed.
This was my dream--the waking proved not so--
For love came like a flower, and grew apace;
I saw it blossom tenderly and frail
Till the dear Spring had run its eager race,
Then the rough wind tossed wide the petals red;
The seeds fell far in soil beyond my pale.
I know not, now, if love be lost, or dead.
EVENING AT
WASHINGTON
The purple stretches of the evening sky
Lean to the fair white city waiting here,
Flecking with gold the marble's lifted tier,
Down the blue marsh where crows to Southward fly.
Flanked by dim ramparts, where the tide dreams by,
High from the city's heart, a lifted spear,
In its straight splendour makes the heavens seem near,
Symbol of man-made force that shall not die.
To the tall crest we gaze in self-command,
Assured the world's our own and we may dare
To raise our Babel thro' forbidden aisles
And hold the skirt of knowledge in our hand,
Great in our moment, spurn the world's despair;
While Heaven looks down through calm unmeasured miles.