Then grinned the Ancient Briton From the tumulus treed with pine: “So, hearts are thwartly smitten In these days as in mine!”
THROUGH snowy woods and shady We went to play a tune To the lonely manor-lady By the light of the Christmas moon.
We violed till, upward glancing To where a mirror leaned, We saw her airily dancing, Deeming her movements screened;
Dancing alone in the room there, Thin-draped in her robe of night; Her postures, glassed in the gloom there, Were a strange phantasmal sight.
She had learnt (we heard when homing) That her roving spouse was dead; Why she had danced in the gloaming We thought, but never said.
JUST at the corner of the wall We met—yes, he and I— Who had not faced in camp or hall Since we bade home good-bye, And what once happened came back—all— Out of those years gone by.
And that strange woman whom we knew And loved—long dead and gone, Whose poor half-perished residue, Tombless and trod, lay yon! But at this moment to our view Rose like a phantom wan.
And in his fixed face I could see, Lit by a lurid shine, The drama re-enact which she Had dyed incarnadine For us, and more. And doubtless he Beheld it too in mine.
A start, as at one slightly known, And with an indifferent air We passed, without a sign being shown That, as it real were, A memory-acted scene had thrown Its tragic shadow there.
I OPENED my shutter at sunrise, And looked at the hill hard by, And I heartily grieved for the comrade Who wandered up there to die.
I let in the morn on the morrow, And failed not to think of him then, As he trod up that rise in the twilight, And never came down again.
I undid the shutter a week thence, But not until after I’d turned Did I call back his last departure By the upland there discerned.
Uncovering the casement long later, I bent to my toil till the gray, When I said to myself, “Ah—what ails me, To forget him all the day!”
As daily I flung back the shutter In the same blank bald routine, He scarcely once rose to remembrance Through a month of my facing the scene.
And ah, seldom now do I ponder At the window as heretofore On the long valued one who died yonder, And wastes by the sycamore.
A PLAIN tilt-bonnet on her head She took the path across the leaze. —Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said, “Too dowdy that, for coquetries, So I can hoe at ease.”