Will she play me false for the promised waltz, In that easiest way of hers? Ah see! she is fair as the rose in her hair, And the sweet love drips from her honied lips, When her fancy stirs.
Will she lightly resist for the promised tryst With a smile of her easy ways? Ah see! she is smiling with a sweetness beguiling All sorrow to laughter till it dances thereafter In a golden maze.
Alas! alack-a-day! she dances away! Haphazard her favor confers. Ah! see where she dances, and her sunlit glances All scattered apart! But I store in my heart A smile of hers.
And thou hast oped the matrix of sweet thought, And graven on the gem rare imagery. Or piercing free thine arts reality, Hast found uncarven gods, as richly wraught; Such tints of soul, such matchless colors fraught With all thy beings dearest phantasy; Such fair illusive forms that luring flee, Within the crystal web of fancy caught. Till to thine eyes, a radiant cosmos spreads In crystaline delight from pole to pole, Of godly folk at play on flowry meads, And one fair form of beauties finished whole! Then through the golden mist one fancy threads: It is the god of gods, thy pristine soul.
Thou golden fragment of the sweetest dream, That ever smiled beside the gates of morn, And left enraptured Beauty half forlorn And half entranced. Still for thy vanished gleam That spirit-maiden weeps. On her refulgent stream No more the tinted bark is lightly borne, But frail as thought by streaming phantoms torn, She waits forever thy returning beam. A golden dream of art's divinity And held bright Beauty's jeweled anadem; Of music breathing immortality Till stonéd silence falls a carven gem. And but a fragment! Ah! couldst thou have sated A bursting heart, what worlds had been created!
As one, who gath'ring flowers in a dream, Hath found a vanished passion all in bloom, And wild sweet odors lifting in the gloom Of olden time, but casts it on a stream, To mar the silver moon's reflectant beam, And laugh at circles sweeping on to doom, In dusky marges, shining in her brume, Hath England found thee. Thus her silly deem! Ah! Shame that she, whose head is vaunted so, Hath vision narrowed to a needle's eye. And only far from home, doth England know That she has doomed another son to die. But fair Columbia brings her wreath of woe, Sweet Rhine, a tear, and lyric France a sigh.