Читать книгу The Cup of Comus: Fact and Fancy - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 8

There is a house beside a way,

Where dwells a ghost of Yesterday:

The old face of a beauty, faded,

Looks from its garden: and the shaded

Long walks of locust-trees, that seem

Forevermore to sigh and dream,

Keep whispering low a word that's true,

Of shapes that haunt its avenue,

Clad as in days of belle and beau,

Who come and go

Around its ancient portico.

At first, in stock and beaver-hat,

With flitting of the moth and bat,

An old man, leaning on a cane,

Comes slowly down the locust lane;

Looks at the house; then, groping, goes

Into the garden where the rose

Still keeps sweet tryst with moth and moon;

And, humming to himself a tune,

– "Lorena" or "Ben Bolt" we'll say, —

Waits, bent and gray,

For some fair ghost of Yesterday.

The Yesterday that holds his all —

More real to him than is the wall

Of mossy stone near which he stands,

Still reaching out for her his hands —

For her, the girl, who waits him there,

A lace-gowned phantom, dark of hair,

Whose loveliness still keeps those walks,

And with whose Memory he talks;

Upon his heart her happy head, —

So it is said, —

The girl, now half a century dead.