III.

    Metempsychosis.

    When Grief comes this way by
    With her wan lip and drooping eye,
    Bid her welcome, woo her boldly;
    Soon she’ll look on thee less coldly.

    Her tears soon cease to flow. 
    ’Tis now not Grief but Joy we know;
    From her smiling face the roses
    Tell the glad metempsychosis.

IV.

Life with the sun in it—­
Shaded by gloom! 
Life with the fun in it—­
Shadowed by Doom!

Life with its Love ever haunted by Hate! 
Life’s laughing morrows frowned over by Fate! 
Young Life’s wild gladness still waylaid by Age! 
All its sweet badness still mocking the sage! 
What can e’er measure the joy of its strife?

What boundless leisure
Count the heaped treasure
Of woe, that’s the pleasure
And beauty of Life?

V.

Once as the aureole
Day left the earth,
Faded, a twilight soul,
Memory, had birth: 
Young were her sister souls, Sorrow and Mirth.

Dark mirrors are her eyes: 
Wherein who gaze
See wan effulgencies
Flicker and blaze—­
Lorn fleeting shadows of beautiful days.

Scan those deep mirrors well
After long years: 
Lo! what aforetime fell
In rain of tears,
In radiant glamour-mist now reappears.

See old wild gladness
Tamed now and coy;
Grief that was madness
Turned into joy. 
Fate cannot harry them now, nor annoy.

Down from yon throbbing blue,
Passionless, fair,
Still faces look on you,
Sunlit their hair,
With a slow smile at your pleasure and care.

Life and death murmurings
From their lips go
In vaster music-rings;
Outward they flow,
Tenderer, wilder, than songs that we know.

VI.

My love’s unchanged—­though time, alas! 
Turns silver-gilt the golden mass
Of flowing hair, and pales, I wis,
The rose that deepened with that kiss—­
The first—­before our marriage was.

And though the fields of corn and grass,
So radiant then, as summers pass
Lose something of their look of bliss,

          My love’s unchanged.

Our tiny girl’s a sturdy lass;
Our boy’s shrill pipe descends to bass;
New friends appear, the old we miss;
My Love grows old ... in spite of this

          My love’s unchanged.

VII.

A Gurly Breeze in Scotland.