With snow instead of birds, and all things freeze.

How much of all my past is dumb with her,

And of my future, too, for with her went Half of that world I ever cared to please!

DEATH OF QUEEN MERCEDES

In a letter to his daughter from Madrid, July 26, 1878, Lowell wrote of Queen Mercedes: "" Anything more tragic than the circumstances of her death it would be hard to imagine. She was actually receiving extreme unction while the guns were firing in honor of her eighteenth birthday, and four days later we saw her dragged to her dreary tomb at the Escorial, followed by the coach and its eight white horses in which she had driven in triumph from the church to the palace on the day of her wedding. The poor brutes tossed their snowy plumes as haughtily now as then. Her death is really a great public loss. She was amiable, intelligent, and simple - not beautiful but good-looking-and was already becoming popular."

HERS all that Earth could promise or bestow,

Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years,

Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears,
A life remote from every sordid woe,
And by a nation's swelled to lordlier flow.
What lurking-place, thought we, for doubts
or fears,

When, the day's swan, she swam along the cheers

Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago? The guns were shouting Io Hymen then That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom;

The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men

To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb. Grim jest of fate! Yet who dare call it blind,

Knowing what life is, what our humankind?

Than that what pleased him earliest still should please:

And who hath incomes safe from chance as these,

Gone in a moment, yet for life his own? All other gold is slave of earthward laws; This to the deeps of ether takes its flight, And on the topmost leaves makes glorious pause

Of parting pathos ere it yield to night: So linger, as from me earth's light withdraws,

Dear touch of Nature, tremulously bright!

PESSIMOPTIMISM

YE little think what toil it was to build
A world of men imperfect even as this,
Where we conceive of Good by what we
miss,

Of Ill by that wherewith best days are filled;

A world whose every atom is self-willed, Whose corner-stone is propt on artifice, Whose joy is shorter-lived than woman's kiss,

Whose wisdom hoarded is but to be spilled.

Yet this is better than a life of caves, Whose highest art was scratching on a bone,

Or chipping toilsome arrowheads of flint; Better, though doomed to hear while Cleon

WHEN the down is on the chin
And the gold-gleam in the hair,
When the birds their sweethearts win
And champagne is in the air,
Love is here, and Love is there,
Love is welcome everywhere.

Summer's cheek too soon turns thin,
Days grow briefer, sunshine rare;
Autumn from his cannekin
Blows the froth to chase Despair:
Love is met with frosty stare,
Cannot house 'neath branches bare.

When new life is in the leaf
And new red is in the rose,
Though Love's Maytime be as brief
As a dragon-fly's repose,

Never moments come like those,

Be they Heaven or Hell: who knows?

The birds but repeat without ending
The same old traditional notes,
Which some, by more happily blending,
Seem to make over new in their throats;

And we men through our old bit of song

run,

Until one just improves on the rest, And we call a thing his, in the long run, Who utters it clearest and best.

AUSPEX

My heart, I cannot still it,
Nest that had song-birds in it;
And when the last shall go,
The dreary days, to fill it,
Instead of lark or linnet,

Shall whirl dead leaves and snow.

Had they been swallows only,
Without the passion stronger
That skyward longs and sings,
Woe's me, I shall be lonely
When I can feel no longer
The impatience of their wings!

A moment, sweet delusion,

Like birds the brown leaves hover;
But it will not be long

Before their wild confusion
Fall wavering down to cover
The poet and his song.

THE PREGNANT COMMENT

OPENING one day a book of mine,
I absent, Hester found a line
Praised with a pencil-mark, and this
She left transfigured with a kiss.

When next upon the page I chance,
Like Poussin's nymphs my pulses dance,
And whirl my fancy where it sees
Pan piping 'neath Arcadian trees,
Whose leaves no winter-scenes rehearse,
Still young and glad as Homer's verse.
"What mean," I ask, "these sudden joys?
This feeling fresher than a boy's?
What makes this line, familiar long,
New as the first bird's April song?
I could, with sense illumined thus,
Clear doubtful texts in Eschylus ! "