Page:All quiet along the Potomac and other poems.djvu/107

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PURPLE.
102

For babyhood passed swiftly by,
And gone for ever,

If Daisy, laying softly down
A waxen doll in gaudy gown,
May hold her hands up for a crown
That shines for ever.




PURPLE.

THE color-fairy in sorrow sat,
With her brushes all awry ;
Her palette, made of a tulip-leaf,
Beside her laid, with its colors dry.

An order, straight from the Fairy Queen,
Had come on a hum-bird's wing
For a thousand elfin parasols,
To be finished late in spring–

Some snowy-white, some azure-ribbed,
Some of the rose's hue;
But for the Queen the artist-elf
Must make the color new.

Thus ran the scroll : "Red as the rose,
Yet blue as Gentian s tender eyes;
Red as the sunset s parting glow,
Blue as a mountain-shadow lies."


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