What are you singing about, little birds,
  Twittering loudly in lime-tree and oak? 
  Telling each other the wonderful words
  On a sweet May evening a lover spoke?

  Butterflies, floating away from the trees,
  With blossom-like wings of delicate dye,
  You are bearing tidings certain to please,
  Scatter them freely, but do not ask why.

  Two lovers stood ’neath a star-lighted sky,
  Half fearfully touching enchanted ground: 
  One lover was Harry, and one was I,
  And the world went merrily round and round.

  Souls rushing together from distant parts,
  Vows utter’d that cannot be ever undone;
  A minute ago two lives and two hearts,
  Through time and eternity now but one.

  O foolish butterflies! chattering birds! 
  Instinct in vain with humanity strives;
  You can’t understand the wonderful words
  Or magical kisses that changed two lives!

  What is Nature made for? is it for us
  The beautiful world is burnish’d and blent? 
  If we had not eyes, would blossoms shine thus? 
  If we had not nostrils, would they have scent?

  I heard a philosopher say—­in isles
  Surrounded by ocean, apart, alone,
  With no living creature to reckon miles,
  Wherein life had never been born or known,

  That the clouds with electric flash may meet,
  And thunder may rattle its dreadful breath,
  Yet never a sound break the rest complete,
  Or the silence of this eternal death;

  That the fierce storm-wind may bluster and blow,
  Tearing the trees from the root-broken ground,
  Or the wild sea-surf may leap and may flow
  In solemn silence with never a sound.

  For sound is but the vibrations of air
  That strike on the drum of the living ear;
  So if never a living ear is there,
  There is nothing to strike and nothing to hear.

  Though the vibrations move on, and live,
  And thus the law of their being obey,
  ’Tis the ear produces the sound they give—­
  That’s what I heard a philosopher say.

  So if thunder, roll’d through quivering air,
  With that awful silence reigning around,
  And you or I suddenly landed there,
  All Nature would break at once into sound.

  It seems very strange and eerie, you know;
  I don’t understand how it is—­do you? 
  But a philosopher said it, so
  I really suppose that it must be true.

  And is not there something in human hearts
  (Mountains, you know, must spring out of the flat)
  That at Love’s light touch into music starts? 
  Ah, what would philosophers say to that?

  There never was summer so bright as this,
  And the world will always be burnished thus;
  For if Love the magical painter is,
  He for ever will paint the same for us.

  ’Tis a light within that illumes the land;
  And free as the birds from sorrow or strife,
  Very close together, and hand in hand,
  We shall walk on through unlimited life.