THE MAPLE

The Maple puts her corals on in May,
While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling,
To be in tune with what the robins sing,
Plastering new log-huts ’mid her branches gray;
But when the Autumn southward turns away,
Then in her veins burns most the blood of Spring. 
And every leaf, intensely blossoming,
Makes the year’s sunset pale the set of day. 
O Youth unprescient, were it only so
With trees you plant, and in whose shade reclined,
Thinking their drifting blooms Fate’s coldest snow,
You carve dear names upon the faithful rind,
Nor in that vernal stem the cross foreknow
That Age shall bear, silent, yet unresigned!

NIGHTWATCHES

While the slow clock, as they were miser’s gold,
Counts and recounts the mornward steps of Time,
The darkness thrills with conscience of each crime
By Death committed, daily grown more bold. 
Once more the list of all my wrongs is told,
And ghostly hands stretch to me from my prime
Helpless farewells, as from an alien clime;
For each new loss redoubles all the old. 
This morn ’twas May; the blossoms were astir
With southern wind; but now the boughs are bent
With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze. 
How much of all my past is dumb with her,
And of my future, too, for with her went
Half of that world I ever cared to please!

DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES

Hers all that Earth could promise or bestow,—­
Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years,
Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears,
A life remote from every sordid woe,
And by a nation’s swelled to lordlier flow. 
What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts or fears,
When, the day’s swan, she swam along the cheers
Of the Alcala, five happy months ago? 
The guns were shouting Io Hymen then
That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom;
The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men
To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb. 
Grim jest of fate!  Yet who dare call it blind,
Knowing what life is, what our human-kind?

PRISON OF CERVANTES

Seat of all woes?  Though Nature’s firm decree
The narrowing soul with narrowing dungeon bind,
Yet was his free of motion as the wind,
And held both worlds, of spirit and sense, in fee. 
In charmed communion with his dual mind
He wandered Spain, himself both knight and hind,
Redressing wrongs he knew must ever be. 
His humor wise could see life’s long deceit,
Man’s baffled aims, nor therefore both despise;
His knightly nature could ill fortune greet
Like an old friend.  Whose ever such kind eyes
That pierced so deep, such scope, save his whose feet
By Avon ceased ’neath the same April’s skies?