That seeks thy face in every other face. 
    As in the mirrored salon of a queen,
  Flashes from glass to glass, as she walks by,
    In sweet reiteration still—­the queen! 
  So is the world for thee to walk in, sweet;
    But to see thee is all things to have seen. 
  And, as the moon in every crystal lake,
    Walking the heaven with little silver feet,
  Sees each bright copy her reflection take,
    And every dew-drop holds its little glass,
  To catch her loveliness as she doth pass,
  So do all things make haste to copy thee. 
    I, then, to see thee thus over and over,
  Am wistful too all lovely shapes to see,
    For each thus makes me more and more thy lover.

  Love’s tenderness

  Deem not my love is only for the bloom,
    The honey and the marble, that is You;
  Tis so, Beloved, common loves consume
    Their treasury, and vanish like the dew. 
    Nay, but my love’s a thing that’s far more true;
  For little loves a little hour hath room,
  But not for us their brief and trivial doom,
    In a far richer soil our loving grew,
  From deeper wells of being it upsprings;
    Nor shall the wildest kiss that makes one mouth,
      Draining all nectar from the flowered world,
    Slake its divine unfathomable drouth;
      And, when your wings against my heart lie furled,
  With what a tenderness it dreams and sings!

  Anima Mundi

  Let all things vanish, if but you remain;
    For if you stay, beloved, what is gone? 
  Yet, should you go, all permanence is vain,
    And all the piled abundance is as none.

  With you beside me in the desert sand,
  Your smile upon me, and on mine your hand,
    Oases green arise, and camel-bells;
  For in the long adventure of your eyes
  Are all the wandering ways to Paradise.

  Existence, in your being, comes and goes;
  What were the garden, love, without the rose? 
  In vain were ears to hear,
    And eyes in vain,
  Lacking your ordered music, sphere to sphere,
    Blind, should your beauty blossom not again.

  The pulse that shakes the world with rhythmic beat
  Is but the passing of your little feet;
  And all the singing vast of all the seas,
    Down from the pole
  To the Hesperides,
    Is but the praying echo of your soul.

  Therefore, beloved, know that this is true—­
  The world exists and vanishes in you! 
  Tis not a lover’s fancy; ask the sky
  If all its stars depend not, even as I,
  Upon your eyelids, when they open or close;
  And let the garden answer with the rose.

  Ballade of the unchanging beloved

  (To I——­a)

  When rumour fain would fright my ear
    With the destruction and decay
  Of things familiar and dear,
    And vaunt of a swift-running day
    That sweeps the fair old Past away;
  Whatever else be strange and new,
    All other things may go or stay,
  So that there be no change in you.