I.
“High as my heart!” Orlando answered thus,
In careless Arden, Arden green to-day,
Parrying with gallant wit the question gay
Touching his lady’s stature. When of us
Lips yet to be, in years lying yet before,
Make question of the stature of thy fame,
The words that we shall answer are the same:
High as our hearts he stood.
What man would more?
Wide-sunned with love thy last late winter days,
Whose blue mild morns were memories of the spring.
To thee spring voices had not ceased to sing,
Nor ever closed to thee fresh woodland ways
Where underneath old leaves the violets are,
And, shy as boyhood’s dream, spring beauties like a star.
II.
Thou wast not robbed of wonder when youth fled,
But still the bud had promise to thine eyes,
And beauty was not sundered from surprise,
And reverent, as reverend, was thy head.
Thy life was music, and thou mad’st it ours.
Not thine, crude scorn of gentle household things;
And yet thy spirit had the sea-bird’s wings,
Nor rested long among the chestnut-flowers.
Spain’s coast of charm, and all the North Sea’s cold
Thou knewest, and thou knewest the soul of eld,
And dusty scroll and volume we beheld
To gold transmuted—not to hard-wrought gold,
But that clear shining of the eastern air,
When Helios rising shakes the splendor of his hair.