Laughing, one day she gave the key,
My riddle’s open-sesame;
Then added, with a smile demure,
Whose downcast lids veiled triumph sure,
’If what I left there give you pain,
You—­you—­can take it off again;
’Twas for my poet, not for him,
Your Doctor Donne there!’

Earth grew dim
And wavered in a golden mist,
As rose, not paper, leaves I kissed. 
Donne, you forgive?  I let you keep
Her precious comment, poet deep.

THE LESSON

I sat and watched the walls of night
  With cracks of sudden lightning glow,
And listened while with clumsy might
  The thunder wallowed to and fro.

The rain fell softly now; the squall,
  That to a torrent drove the trees,
Had whirled beyond us to let fall
  Its tumult on the whitening seas.

But still the lightning crinkled keen,
  Or fluttered fitful from behind
The leaden drifts, then only seen,
  That rumbled eastward on the wind.

Still as gloom followed after glare,
  While bated breath the pine-trees drew,
Tiny Salmoneus of the air,
  His mimic bolts the firefly threw.

He thought, no doubt, ’Those flashes grand,
  That light for leagues the shuddering sky,
Are made, a fool could understand,
  By some superior kind of fly.

’He’s of our race’s elder branch,
  His family-arms the same as ours. 
Both born the twy-forked flame to launch,
  Of kindred, if unequal, powers.’

And is man wiser?  Man who takes
  His consciousness the law to be
Of all beyond his ken, and makes
  God but a bigger kind of Me?

SCIENCE AND POETRY

He who first stretched his nerves of subtile wire
Over the land and through the sea-depths still,
Thought only of the flame-winged messenger
As a dull drudge that should encircle earth
With sordid messages of Trade, and tame
Blithe Ariel to a bagman.  But the Muse
Not long will be defrauded.  From her foe
Her misused wand she snatches; at a touch,
The Age of Wonder is renewed again,
And to our disenchanted day restores
The Shoes of Swiftness that give odds to Thought,
The Cloak that makes invisible; and with these
I glide, an airy fire, from shore to shore,
Or from my Cambridge whisper to Cathay.

A NEW YEAR’S GREETING

The century numbers fourscore years;
  You, fortressed in your teens,
To Time’s alarums close your ears,
And, while he devastates your peers,
  Conceive not what he means.

If e’er life’s winter fleck with snow
  Your hair’s deep shadowed bowers,
That winsome head an art would know
To make it charm, and wear it so
  As ’twere a wreath of flowers.

If to such fairies years must come,
  May yours fall soft and slow
As, shaken by a bee’s low hum,
The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb,
  Down to their mates below!