Chapter II

Ah, those were days of silent happiness! I never spoke, and had no need to speak, While on the windy down-land, cheek by cheek, The slow-driven sun beheld us. Each caress Had oratory for its own defence; And when I kissed or felt her fingers press, I envied not Demosthenes his Greek, Nor Tully for his Latin eloquence.

PERILS OF THE SMALL HOURS.

When life burns low as the fire in the grate And all the evening’s books are read, I sit alone, save for the dead And the lovers I have grown to hate.

But all at once the narrow gloom Of hatred and despair expands In tenderness: thought stretches hands To welcome to the midnight room

Another presence:--a memory Of how last year in the sunlit field, Laughing, you suddenly revealed Beauty in immortality.

For so it is; a gesture strips Life bare of all its make-believe. All unprepared we may receive Our casual apocalypse.

Sheer beauty, then you seemed to stir Unbodied soul; soul sleeps to night, And love comes, dimming spirit’s sight, When body plays interpreter.

RETURN TO AN OLD HOME.

In this wood--how the hazels have grown!-- I left a treasure all my own Of childish kisses and laughter and pain; Left, till I might come back again To take from the familiar earth My hoarded secret and count its worth. And all the spider-work of the years, All the time-spun gossamers, Dewed with each succeeding spring; And the piled up leaves the Autumns fling To the sweet corruption of death on death.... At the sudden stir of my spirit’s breath All scattered. New and fair and bright As ever it was, before my sight The treasure lay, and nothing missed. So having handled all and kissed, I put them back, adding one new And precious memory of you.

_Printed at The Vincent Works, Oxford._