Long days be his, and each as lusty-sweet
  As gracious natures find his song to be;
May Age steal on with softly-cadenced feet
Falling in music, as for him were meet
  Whose choicest verse is harsher-toned than he!

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY

‘Come forth!’ my catbird calls to me,
  ’And hear me sing a cavatina
That, in this old familiar tree,
  Shall hang a garden of Alcina.

’These buttercups shall brim with wine
  Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic;
May not New England be divine? 
  My ode to ripening summer classic?

’Or, if to me you will not hark,
  By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing
Till all the alder-coverts dark
  Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

’Come out beneath the unmastered sky,
  With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,
  Without premeditated graces.

’What boot your many-volumed gains,
  Those withered leaves forever turning,
To win, at best, for all your pains,
  A nature mummy-wrapt to learning?

’The leaves wherein true wisdom lies
  On living trees the sun are drinking;
Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,
  Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

’"Come out!” with me the oriole cries,
  Escape the demon that pursues you: 
And, hark, the cuckoo weather-wise,
  Still hiding farther onward, wooes you.’

’Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,
  Hast poured from that syringa thicket
The quaintly discontinuous lays
  To which I hold a season-ticket.

’A season-ticket cheaply bought
  With a dessert of pilfered berries,
And who so oft my soul hast caught
  With morn and evening voluntaries,

’Deem me not faithless, if all day
  Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
  With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

’A bird is singing in my brain
  And bubbling o’er with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain
  Fed with the sap of old romances.

’I ask no ampler skies than those
  His magic music rears above me,
No falser friends, no truer foes,—­
  And does not Dona Clara love me?

’Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars,
  A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing,
Then silence deep with breathless stars,
  And overhead a white hand flashing.

’O music of all moods and climes,
  Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly,
Where still, between the Christian chimes,
  The Moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!

’O life borne lightly in the hand,
  For friend or foe with grace Castilian! 
O valley safe in Fancy’s land,
  Not tramped to mud yet by the million!

’Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale
  To his, my singer of all weathers,
My Calderon, my nightingale,
  My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.