[Illustration:  POETRY.  Photogravure from a painting by C. Schweninger.]

SWEETHEART, SIGH NO MORE

It was with doubt and trembling
I whispered in her ear. 
Go, take her answer, bird-on-bough,
That all the world may hear—­
Sweetheart, sigh no more!

Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
Upon the wayside tree,
How fair she is, how true she is,
How dear she is to me—­
Sweetheart, sigh no more!

Sing it, sing it, and through the summer long
The winds among the clover-tops,
And brooks, for all their silvery stops,
Shall envy you the song—­
Sweetheart, sigh no more!

BROKEN MUSIC

“A note
All out of tune in this world’s instrument.”

AMY LEVY.

I know not in what fashion she was made,
Nor what her voice was, when she used to speak,
Nor if the silken lashes threw a shade
On wan or rosy cheek.

I picture her with sorrowful vague eyes,
Illumed with such strange gleams of inner light
As linger in the drift of London skies
Ere twilight turns to night.

     I know not; I conjecture.  ’Twas a girl
       That with her own most gentle desperate hand
     From out God’s mystic setting plucked life’s pearl—­
       ’Tis hard to understand.

     So precious life is!  Even to the old
       The hours are as a miser’s coins, and she—­
     Within her hands lay youth’s unminted gold
       And all felicity.

     The winged impetuous spirit, the white flame
       That was her soul once, whither has it flown? 
     Above her brow gray lichens blot her name
       Upon the carven stone.

     This is her Book of Verses—­wren-like notes,
       Shy franknesses, blind gropings, haunting fears;
     At times across the chords abruptly floats
       A mist of passionate tears.

     A fragile lyre too tensely keyed and strung,
       A broken music, weirdly incomplete: 
     Here a proud mind, self-baffled and self-stung,
       Lies coiled in dark defeat.

     ELMWOOD

     In Memory of James Russell Lowell

     Here, in the twilight, at the well-known gate
     I linger, with no heart to enter more. 
     Among the elm-tops the autumnal air
     Murmurs, and spectral in the fading light
     A solitary heron wings its way
     Southward—­save this no sound or touch of life. 
     Dark is the window where the scholar’s lamp
     Was used to catch a pallor from the dawn.

       Yet I must needs a little linger here. 
     Each shrub and tree is eloquent of him,
     For tongueless things and silence have their speech. 
     This is the path familiar to his foot
     From infancy to manhood and old age;
     For in a chamber of that ancient house
     His eyes first opened