THE AMULET

Your picture smiles as first it smiled;
  The ring you gave is still the same;
Your letter tells, O changing child! 
  No tidings since it came.

Give me an amulet
  That keeps intelligence with you,—­
Red when you love, and rosier red,
  And when you love not, pale and blue.

Alas! that neither bonds nor vows
  Can certify possession;
Torments me still the fear that love
  Died in its last expression.

THINE EYES STILL SHINED

Thine eyes still shined for me, though far
  I lonely roved the land or sea: 
As I behold yon evening star,
  Which yet beholds not me.

This morn I climbed the misty hill
  And roamed the pastures through;
How danced thy form before my path
  Amidst the deep-eyed dew!

When the redbird spread his sable wing,
  And showed his side of flame;
When the rosebud ripened to the rose,
  In both I read thy name.

EROS

The sense of the world is short,—­
Long and various the report,—­
  To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not outlearned it;
And, how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,
  Not to be improved.

HERMIONE

On a mound an Arab lay,
And sung his sweet regrets
And told his amulets: 
The summer bird
His sorrow heard,
And, when he heaved a sigh profound,
The sympathetic swallow swept the ground.

’If it be, as they said, she was not fair,
Beauty’s not beautiful to me,
But sceptred genius, aye inorbed,
Culminating in her sphere. 
This Hermione absorbed
The lustre of the land and ocean,
Hills and islands, cloud and tree,
In her form and motion.

’I ask no bauble miniature,
Nor ringlets dead
Shorn from her comely head,
Now that morning not disdains
Mountains and the misty plains
Her colossal portraiture;
They her heralds be,
Steeped in her quality,
And singers of her fame
Who is their Muse and dame.

’Higher, dear swallows! mind not what I say. 
Ah! heedless how the weak are strong,
Say, was it just,
In thee to frame, in me to trust,
Thou to the Syrian couldst belong?

’I am of a lineage
That each for each doth fast engage;
In old Bassora’s schools, I seemed
Hermit vowed to books and gloom,—­
Ill-bestead for gay bridegroom. 
I was by thy touch redeemed;
When thy meteor glances came,
We talked at large of worldly fate,
And drew truly every trait.

’Once I dwelt apart,
Now I live with all;
As shepherd’s lamp on far hill-side
Seems, by the traveller espied,
A door into the mountain heart,
So didst thou quarry and unlock
Highways for me through the rock.