Chapter II

When midnight comes it brings a moon:
A scent is strewn
Of honey and wild-thorns broadcast
Beneath the stars. When I have passed
Under dark cedars, solemn pines,
Through dodder-drowned petunias,
Corn-flower and the columbine,
To where azaleas, choked with grass,
And peonies, like great wisps, shine,
I reach banked honeysuckle vines,
Piled deep and trammeled with the gourd
And morning-glory--one wild hoard
Of rich aroma--where the seat,
The rustic bench, where oft we sat,--
Now warped and old with rain and heat,--
Still stands upon its mossy mat:
And here I rest; and then--a word
I seem to hear;
A soft word whispered in my ear;
Her voice it seems; no thing is near;
I look around:--I have but heard
The plaintive note of some lost bird
Trickle through night,--awakened where,
'Neath its thick lair of twisted twigs,
The jarring and incessant grigs
Hum:--dream-drugged so, the haunted air
Makes all my soul as heavy as
Dew-poppied grass.

III

Once when the moon rose, fair and full,--
Like some sea-seen Hesperian pool,
A splash of gold through tangling trees,--
Or like the Island beautiful
Of Avalon in haunted seas,--
There came a sighing in the trees
As of sad lips; there was no breeze,
And yet sad sighings shook the trees.
And when, all in a mystic space,
Her orb swam, amiable white,
Right in that shattered casement, by
The broken porch the creepers lace,
Born of a moonbeam and a sigh,
I saw _her_ face,
Pale through a mist of tears; so slight,
So immaterial, ah me!
In pensiveness, and vanished grace,
'Twas like an olden melody.