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AVE MARIA

HOLLOW spaces, large and deep,
Flow around your quiet sleep.
One would think your dreaming head
Had eternity for its bed!
Oh, how green, for all the night.
Is the floating liquid air.
Full of whispers, full of light.
Vague earth murmurs everywhere!

Listen! Did you hear that sound
In your eyelid-drooping sleep,
Falling thro' the listening night,
Falling, falling? And the earth
Melts in vaporous mist before it,
Melts as if from very birth
It had watched and waited for it!
Listen!

'Tis a petal from the moon
From that cold and chaste moon-flower.
Flung in languid lotus hour.
Like a thought after a tune;
Like a tune after a thought,
Sweet with ecstasy unsought!
And all other lovely things.
Such as shadow-veined moth-wings.
Such as shells from drifting seas.
Such as wild anemones,