Not prison’d in a golden cage,
  To sigh or sing her lonely state,
A show for youth or doating age,
  With idiot eyes to contemplate.

But when the season sends a thrill
  To ev’ry heart that lives and moves,
She seeks the freedom of the hill,
  Or shelter of the noontide groves.

There, happy with her chosen mate,
  And circled by her chirping brood,
Forgets the pain of being great
  In the mere bliss of being good.

And thus the festive summer yields
  No sight more happy, none so gay,
As when amid her subject-fields
  She wanders on from day to day.

Resembling her, whom proud and fond,
  The bard hath sung of—­she of old,
Who bore upon her snow-white wand,
  All Erin through, the ring of gold.

Thus, from her castles coming forth,
  She wanders many a summer hour,
Bearing the ring of private worth
  Upon the silver wand of Power.

Thus musing, while around me flew
  Sweet airs from fancy’s amaranth bowers,
Methought, what this fair queen doth do,
  Hath yearly done the queen of flowers.

The beauteous queen of all the flowers,
  Whose faintest sigh is like a spell,
Was born in Eden’s sinless bowers
  Long ere our primal parents fell.

There in a perfect form she grew,
  Nor felt decay, nor tasted death;
Heaven was reflected in her hue,
  And heaven’s own odours filled her breath.

And ere the angel of the sword
  Drove thence the founders of our race,
They knelt before him, and implor’d
  Some relic of that radiant place: 

Some relic that, while time would last,
  Should make men weep their fatal sin;
Proof of the glory that was past,
  And type of that they yet might win.

The angel turn’d, and ere his hands
  The gates of bliss for ever close,
Pluck’d from the fairest tree that stands
  Within heaven’s walls—­the peerless rose.

And as he gave it unto them,
  Let fall a tear upon its leaves—­
The same celestial liquid gem
  We oft perceive on dewy eves.

Grateful the hapless twain went forth,
  The golden portals backward whirl’d,
Then first they felt the biting north,
  And all the rigour of this world.

Then first the dreadful curse had power
  To chill the life-streams at their source,
Till e’en the sap within the flower
  Grew curdled in its upward course.

They twin’d their trembling hands across
  Their trembling breasts against the drift,
Then sought some little mound of moss
  Wherein to lay their precious gift.

Some little soft and mossy mound,
  Wherein the flower might rest till morn;
In vain!  God’s curse was on the ground,
  For through the moss out gleam’d the thorn!

Out gleam’d the fork`ed plant, as if
  The serpent tempter, in his rage,
Had put his tongue in every leaf
  To mock them through their pilgrimage.