A NEWPORT ROMANCE. THEY say that she died of a broken heart Her lover was fickle and fine and French : When he sailed away from her arms-poor wench! I marvel much what periwigged phrase Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker, At what golden-laced speech of those modish days She listened-the mischief take her! But she kept the posies of mignonette That he gave; and ever as their bloom failed And faded (though with her tears still wet) Her youth with their own exhaled. A Newport Romance. Till one night, when the sea-fog wrapped a shroud Round spar and spire and tarn and tree, Her soul went up on that lifted cloud From this sad old house by the sea. And ever since then, when the clock strikes two, The delicate odour of mignonette, Is all that tells of her story; yet Could she think of a sweeter way? I sit in the sad old house to-night,- For the laugh is fled from porch and lawn, And the bugle died from the fort on the hill, And the twitter of girls on the stairs is gone, And the grand piano is still. 131 Somewhere in the darkness a clock strikes two; And there is no sound in the sad old house, But the long veranda dripping with dew, The light of my study-lamp streams out Was it the trick of a sense o'erwrought I open the window, and seem almost— Of its Great Gulf artery off the coast, In my neighbour's windows the gas-lights flare, As the dancers swing in a waltz of Strauss ; And I wonder now could I fit that air To the song of this sad old house. A Newport Romance. And no odour of mignonette there is But the breath of morn on the dewy lawn ; And mayhap from causes as slight as this The quaint old legend is born. But the soul of that subtile, sad perfume, As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast The mummy laid in his rocky tomb, Awakens my buried past. 133 And I think of the passion that shook my youth, And I hear no rustle of stiff brocade, For now that the ghosts of my heart are laid, But whether she came as a faint perfume, THE HAWK'S NEST. (SIERRAS.) WE checked our pace, the red road sharply rounding; We heard the troubled flow Of the dark olive depths of pines, resounding A thousand feet below. Above the tumult of the cañon lifted, The gray hawk breathless hung; Or where half-way the mountain side was furrowed With many a seam and scar; Or some abandoned tunnel dimly burrowed,- A mole-hill seen so far. |