I dare not linger on the moment when
  My boat I beached beside her tepee door;
I heard the wail of women and of men,—­
  I saw the death-fires lighted on the shore. 
No language tells the torture or the pain,
  The bitterness that flooded all my life,—­
When I was led to look on her again,
  That queen of women pledged to be my wife. 
To look upon the beauty of her face,
  The still closed eyes, the lips that knew no breath;
To look, to learn,—­to realize my place
  Had been usurped by my one rival—­Death. 
A storm of wrecking sorrow beat and broke
  About my heart, and life shut out its light
Till through my anguish some one gently spoke,
  And said, “Twice did she call for thee last night.”

I started up—­and bending o’er my dead,
  Asked when did her sweet lips in silence close. 
“She called thy name—­then passed away,” they said,
“Just on the hour whereat the moon arose.”

Among the lonely Lakes I go no more,
  For she who made their beauty is not there;
The paleface rears his tepee on the shore
  And says the vale is fairest of the fair. 
Full many years have vanished since, but still
  The voyageurs beside the campfire tell
How, when the moonrise tips the distant hill,
  They hear strange voices through the silence swell. 
The paleface loves the haunted lakes they say,
  And journeys far to watch their beauty spread
Before his vision; but to me the day,
  The night, the hour, the seasons are all dead. 
I listen heartsick, while the hunters tell
  Why white men named the valley The Qu’Appelle.

THE ART OF ALMA-TADEMA

There is no song his colours cannot sing,
  For all his art breathes melody, and tunes
The fine, keen beauty that his brushes bring
  To murmuring marbles and to golden Junes.

The music of those marbles you can hear
  In every crevice, where the deep green stains
Have sunken when the grey days of the year
  Spilled leisurely their warm, incessant rains

That, lingering, forget to leave the ledge,
  But drenched into the seams, amid the hush
Of ages, leaving but the silent pledge
  To waken to the wonder of his brush.

And at the Master’s touch the marbles leap
  To life, the creamy onyx and the skins
Of copper-coloured leopards, and the deep,
  Cool basins where the whispering water wins

Reflections from the gold and glowing sun,
  And tints from warm, sweet human flesh, for fair
And subtly lithe and beautiful, leans one—­
  A goddess with a wealth of tawny hair.

GOOD-BYE

Sounds of the seas grow fainter,
  Sounds of the sands have sped;
The sweep of gales,
The far white sails,
  Are silent, spent and dead.

Sounds of the days of summer
  Murmur and die away,
And distance hides
The long, low tides,
  As night shuts out the day.