All things to-day “Couleur de rose,”
    I see,—­oh, why? 
  I know, and my dear love she knows,
    Why, oh, why! 
  On both my eyes her lips she set,
  All red and warm and dewy wet,
    As she passed by. 
  The kiss did not my eyelids close,
  But like a rosy vapor goes,
    Where’er I sit, where’er I lie,
  Before my every glance, and shows
    All things to-day “Couleur de rose.”

  Would it last thus?  Alas, who knows? 
    Men ask and sigh: 
  They say it fades, “Couleur de rose.” 
    Why, oh, why? 
  Without swift joy and sweet surprise,
  Surely those lips upon my eyes
    Could never lie,
  Though both our heads were white as snows,
  And though the bitterest storm that blows,
    Of trouble and adversity,
  Had bent us low:  all life still shows
    To eyes that love “Couleur de rose.”

This sonnet, also, she persisted in calling Stephen’s, and not her own, because he had asked her the question which had suggested it:—­

Lovers’ thoughts.

“How feels the earth when, breaking from the night,
The sweet and sudden Dawn impatient spills
Her rosy colors all along the hills? 
How feels the sea, as it turns sudden white,
And shines like molten silver in the light
Which pours from eastward when the full moon fills
Her time to rise?”

                  “I know not, love, what thrills
  The earth, the sea, may feel.  How should I know? 
  Except I guess by this,—­the joy I feel
  When sudden on my silence or my gloom
  Thy presence bursts and lights the very room? 
  Then on my face doth not glad color steal
  Like shining waves, or hill-tops’ sunrise glow?”

One of the others was the poem of which I spoke once before, the poem which had been suggested to her by her desolate sense of homelessness on the first night of her arrival in Penfield.  This poem had been widely copied after its first appearance in one of the magazines; and it had been more than once said of it, “Surely no one but a genuine outcast could have written such a poem as this.”  It was hard for Mercy’s friends to associate the words with her.  When she was asked how it happened that she wrote them, she exclaimed, “I did not write that poem, I lived it one night,—­the night when I came to Penfield, and drove through these streets in the rain with mother.  No vagabond in the world ever felt more forlorn than I did then.”

  The outcast.

  O sharp, cold wind, thou art my friend! 
  And thou, fierce rain, I need not dread
  Thy wonted touch upon my head! 
  On, loving brothers!  Wreak and spend
  Your force on all these dwellings.  Rend
  These doors so pitilessly locked,
  To keep the friendless out!  Strike dead
  The fires whose glow hath only mocked
  By muffled rays the night where I,
  The lonely outcast, freezing lie!