If she would come, now, and say,
What will you Lover?
—
She who has the fairest gifts of all the earth to give—
Think you I should ask some tremendous thing to prove her,
Her life, say, and all her love, so long as she might live?
Should I touch her hair? her hands? her garments, even?
Nay! for such rewards the gods their own good time have set!
Once, these were
all
mine: the least, poor one was heaven:
Now, lest she remember, I pray that she forget.
Merely should I ask—ah! she would not refuse them
Who still seems very kind when I meet with her in dreams—
Only three of our old days, and—should she help to choose them
Would the first not be in April, beside the sudden streams?......
Once, upon a morning, up the path that we had taken,
We saw Spring come where the willow-buds are grey;
Heard the high hills, as with tread of armies, shaken;
Felt the strong sun—O, the glory of that day!
And then—what? one afternoon of quiet summer weather
O, woodlands and meadow-lands along the blue St. John,
My birch finds a path—though your rafts lie close together—
Then O! what starry miles before the grey o' the dawn!........
I have met the new day, among the misty islands,
Come with whine of saw-mills and whirr of hidden wings,
Gleam of dewy cobwebs, smell of grassy highlands.—
Ah! the blood grows young again thinking of these things.
Then, last and best of all! Though all else were found hollow
Would Time not send a little space, before the Autumn's close,
And lead us up the road—the old road we used to follow
Among the sunset hills till the Hunter's Moon arise?......
Then, Home through the poplar-wood! damp across our faces
The grey leaves that fall, the moths that flutter by:
Yea! this for me, now, of all old hours and places,
To keep when I am dead, Time, until she come to die.