POEMS OF OCCASION
Old, young, with outstretched hand, with eager eye,
Fast follow where her winged sandals fly,
While by some witchery unto each she seems
His dearest hope, the spirit of his dreams.
Ah, me! how like those dupes of Pleasure's chase,
Yet how unlike, we left our starting-place!
Is there not something nobler, far more true,
In the Ideal, still before our view,
Upon whose shining course we followed far
While sank and rose the night and morning star?
Ever we saw a bright glance cast behind
Or heard a word of hope borne down the wind,—
As yet we see and hear, and follow still
With faithful hearts and long-enduring will.
In what weird circle has the enchantress led
Our footsteps, so that now again they tread
These walks, and all that on the course befell
Seems to ourselves a shadow and a spell?
Was it the magic of a moment's trance,
A scholar's day-dream? Have we been, perchance,
Like that bewildered king who dipped his face
In water—while a dervish paused to trace
A mystic phrase—and, ere he raised it, lived
A score of seasons, labored, journeyed, wived
In a strange city,—Tunis or Algiers,—
And, after what had seemed so many years,
Came to himself, and found all this had been
During the palace-clock's brief noonday din?
For here the same blithe robins seem to house
In the elm-forest, underneath whose boughs
We too were sheltered; nay, we cannot mark
The five-and-twenty rings, beneath the bark,
That tell the growth of some historic tree,
Since we, too, were a part of Arcady.
And in our trance, negari, should the bell
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