Poems. Howells William Dean

story is old and weary:

      Ah, child! it is known to thee.

      Who was it that last night kissed thee

      Under the cherry-tree?

VI

      Like a bird of evil presage,

      To the lonely house on the shore

      Came the wind with a tale of shipwreck,

      And shrieked at the bolted door,

      And flapped its wings in the gables,

      And shouted the well-known names,

      And buffeted the windows

      Afeard in their shuddering frames.

      It was night, and it is morning,–

      The summer sun is bland,

      The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,

      In to the summer land.

      The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,

      In the sun so soft and bright,

      And toss and play with the dead man

      Drowned in the storm last night.

VII

      I remember the burning brushwood,

      Glimmering all day long

      Yellow and weak in the sunlight,

      Now leaped up red and strong,

      And fired the old dead chestnut,

      That all our years had stood,

      Gaunt and gray and ghostly,

      Apart from the sombre wood;

      And, flushed with sudden summer,

      The leafless boughs on high

      Blossomed in dreadful beauty

      Against the darkened sky.

      We children sat telling stories,

      And boasting what we should be,

      When we were men like our fathers,

      And watched the blazing tree,

      That showered its fiery blossoms,

      Like a rain of stars, we said,

      Of crimson and azure and purple.

      That night, when I lay in bed,

      I could not sleep for seeing,

      Whenever I closed my eyes,

      The tree in its dazzling splendor

      Against the darkened skies.

      I cannot sleep for seeing,

      With closéd eyes to-night,

      The tree in its dazzling splendor

      Dropping its blossoms bright;

      And old, old dreams of childhood

      Come thronging my weary brain,

      Dear, foolish beliefs and longings:

      I doubt, are they real again?

      It is nothing, and nothing, and nothing,

      That I either think or see:

      The phantoms of dead illusions

      To-night are haunting me.

      IN AUGUST

      All the long August afternoon,

      The little drowsy stream

      Whispers a melancholy tune,

      As if it dreamed of June

      And whispered in its dream.

      The thistles show beyond the brook

      Dust on their down and bloom,

      And out of many a weed-grown nook

      The aster-flowérs look

      With eyes of tender gloom.

      The silent orchard aisles are sweet

      With smell of ripening fruit.

      Through the sere grass, in shy retreat,

      Flutter, at coming feet,

      The robins strange and mute.

      There is no wind to stir the leaves,

      The harsh leaves overhead;

      Only the querulous cricket grieves,

      And shrilling locust weaves

      A song of Summer dead.

      THE EMPTY HOUSE

      The wet trees hang above the walks

      Purple with damps and earthish stains,

      And strewn by moody, absent rains

      With rose-leaves from the wild-grown stalks.

      Unmown, in heavy, tangled swaths,

      The ripe June-grass is wanton blown;

      Snails slime the untrodden threshold-stone;

      Along the sills hang drowsy moths.

      Down the blank visage of the wall,

      Where many a wavering trace appears,

      Like a forgotten trace of tears,

      From swollen eaves the slow drops crawl.

      Where everything was wide before,

      The curious wind, that comes and goes,

      Finds all the latticed windows close,

      Secret and close the bolted door.

      And with the shrewd and curious wind,

      That in the archéd doorway cries,

      And at the bolted portal tries,

      And harks and listens at the blind,–

      Forever lurks my thought about,

      And in the ghostly middle-night

      Finds all the hidden windows bright,

      And sees the guests go in and out,

      And lingers till the pallid dawn,

      And feels the mystery deeper there

      In silent, gust-swept chambers, bare,

      With all the midnight revel gone;

      But wanders through the lonesome rooms,

      Where harsh the astonished cricket calls,

      And, from the hollows of the walls

      Vanishing, start unshapen glooms;

      And lingers yet, and cannot come

      Out of the drear and desolate place,

      So full of ruin’s solemn grace,

      And haunted with the ghost of home.

      BUBBLES

I

      I stood on the brink in childhood,

      And watched the bubbles go

      From the rock-fretted, sunny ripple

      To the smoother tide below;

      And over the white creek-bottom,

      Under them every one,

      Went golden stars in the water,

      All luminous with the sun.

      But the bubbles broke on the surface,

      And under, the stars of gold

      Broke; and