’On a green spot in the desert,
  Gleaming like an emerald star,
Where a palm-tree, in lone silence,
  Yearning for its mate afar,
Droops above a silver runnel,
  Slender as a scimitar,

’There thou’lt find the humble postern
  To the castle of my foe;
If thy love burn clear and faithful,
  Strike the gateway, green and low,
Ask to enter, and the warder
  Surely will not say thee no.’

Slept again the aspen silence,
  But her loneliness was o’er;
Bound her soul a motherly patience
  Clasped its arms forevermore;
From her heart ebbed back the sorrow,
  Leaving smooth the golden shore.

Donned she now the pilgrim scallop,
  Took the pilgrim staff in hand;
Like a cloud-shade flitting eastward,
  Wandered she o’er sea and land;
And her footsteps in the desert
  Fell like cool rain on the sand.

Soon, beneath the palm-tree’s shadow,
  Knelt she at the postern low;
And thereat she knocked full gently,
  Fearing much the warder’s no;
All her heart stood still and listened,
  As the door swung backward slow.

There she saw no surly warder
  With an eye like bolt and bar;
Through her soul a sense of music
  Throbbed, and, like a guardian Lar,
On the threshold stood an angel,
  Bright and silent as a star.

Fairest seemed he of God’s seraphs,
  And her spirit, lily-wise,
Opened when he turned upon her
  The deep welcome of his eyes,
Sending upward to that sunlight
  All its dew for sacrifice.

Then she heard a voice come onward
  Singing with a rapture new,
As Eve heard the songs in Eden,
  Dropping earthward with the dew;
Well she knew the happy singer,
  Well the happy song she knew.

Forward leaped she o’er the threshold,
  Eager as a glancing surf;
Fell from her the spirit’s languor,
  Fell from her the body’s scurf;
’Neath the palm next day some Arabs
  Found a corpse upon the turf.

THE BIRCH-TREE

Rippling through thy branches goes the sunshine,
Among thy leaves that palpitate forever;
Ovid in thee a pining Nymph had prisoned,
The soul once of some tremulous inland river,
Quivering to tell her woe, but, ah! dumb, dumb forever!

While all the forest, witched with slumberous moonshine,
Holds up its leaves in happy, happy stillness,
Waiting the dew, with breath and pulse suspended,
I hear afar thy whispering, gleamy islands,
And track thee wakeful still amid the wide-hung silence.

On the brink of some wood-nestled lakelet,
Thy foliage, like the tresses of a Dryad,
Dripping round thy slim white stem, whose shadow
Slopes quivering down the water’s dusky quiet,
Thou shrink’st as on her bath’s edge would some startled Naiad.

Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers;
Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping;
Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience,
And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping
Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping.