And when the perfect flower lay free,
  Like some great moth whose gorgeous wings
  Fan o’er the husk unconsciously,
  Silken, in airy balancings,—­
  She saw all gay dishevellings
  Of fairy flags, whose revellings
  Illumine night’s enchanted rings. 
  So royal red no blood of kings
  She thought, and Summer in the room
  Sealed her escutcheon on their bloom,
  In the glad girl’s imaginings.

  Now, said she, in the heart of the woods
  The sweet south-winds assert their power,
  And blow apart the snowy snoods
  Of trilliums in their thrice-green bower. 
  Now all the swamps are flushed with dower
  Of viscid pink, where, hour by hour,
  The bees swim amorous, and a shower
  Reddens the stream where cardinals tower. 
  Far lost in fern of fragrant stir
  Her fancies roam, for unto her
  All Nature came in this one flower.

  Sometimes she set it on the ledge
  That it might not be quite forlorn
  Of wind and sky, where o’er the edge,
  Some gaudy petal, slowly borne,
  Fluttered to earth in careless scorn,
  Caught, for a fallen piece of morn
  From kindling vapors loosely shorn,
  By urchins ragged and wayworn,
  Who saw, high on the stone embossed,
  A laughing face, a hand that tossed
  A prodigal spray just freshly torn.

  What wizard hints across them fleet,—­
  These heirs of all the town’s thick sin,
  Swift gypsies of the tortuous street,
  With childhood yet on cheek and chin! 
  What voices dropping through the din
  An airy murmuring begin,—­
  These floating flakes, so fine and thin,
  Were they and rock-laid earth akin? 
  Some woman of the gods was she,
  The generous maiden in her glee? 
  And did whole forests grow within?

  A tissue rare as the hoar-frost,
  White as the mists spring dawns condemn,
  The shadowy wrinkles round her lost,
  She wrought with branch and anadem,
  Through the fine meshes netting them,
  Pomegranate-flower and leaf and stem. 
  Dropping it o’er her diadem
  To float below her gold-stitched hem,
  Some duchess through the court should sail
  Hazed in the cloud of this white veil,
  As when a rain-drop mists a gem.

  Her tresses once when this was done,
 —­Vanished the skein, the needle bare,—­
  She dressed with wreaths vermilion
  Bright as a trumpet’s dazzling blare. 
  Nor knew that in Queen Dido’s hair,
  Loading the Carthaginian air,
  Ancestral blossoms flamed as fair
  As any ever hanging there. 
  While o’er her cheek their scarlet gleam
  Shot down a vivid varying beam,
  Like sunshine on a brown-bronzed pear.

  And then the veil thrown over her,
  The vapor of the snowy lace
  Fell downward, as the gossamer
  Tossed from the autumn winds’ wild race
  Falls round some garden-statue’s grace. 
  Beneath, the blushes on her face
  Fled with the Naiad’s shifting chase
  When flashing through a watery space. 
  And in the dusky mirror glanced
  A splendid phantom, where there danced
  All brilliances in paler trace.