Part 62

Their liquid feet go softly out Upon a sea of blond; They spurn the air as 't were too mean For creatures so renowned.

Their ribbons just beyond the eye, They struggle some for breath, And yet the crowd applauds below; They would not encore death.

The gilded creature strains and spins, Trips frantic in a tree, Tears open her imperial veins And tumbles in the sea.

The crowd retire with an oath The dust in streets goes down, And clerks in counting-rooms observe, ''T was only a balloon.'

XXIV.

EVENING.

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon.

The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go.

A vastness, as a neighbor, came, -- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home, -- And so the night became.

XXV.

COCOON.

Drab habitation of whom? Tabernacle or tomb, Or dome of worm, Or porch of gnome, Or some elf's catacomb?

XXVI.

SUNSET.

A sloop of amber slips away Upon an ether sea, And wrecks in peace a purple tar, The son of ecstasy.

XXVII.

AURORA.

Of bronze and blaze The north, to-night! So adequate its forms, So preconcerted with itself, So distant to alarms, -- An unconcern so sovereign To universe, or me, It paints my simple spirit With tints of majesty, Till I take vaster attitudes, And strut upon my stem, Disdaining men and oxygen, For arrogance of them.

My splendors are menagerie; But their competeless show Will entertain the centuries When I am, long ago, An island in dishonored grass, Whom none but daisies know.

XXVIII.

THE COMING OF NIGHT.

How the old mountains drip with sunset, And the brake of dun! How the hemlocks are tipped in tinsel By the wizard sun!

How the old steeples hand the scarlet, Till the ball is full, -- Have I the lip of the flamingo That I dare to tell?

Then, how the fire ebbs like billows, Touching all the grass With a departing, sapphire feature, As if a duchess pass!

How a small dusk crawls on the village Till the houses blot; And the odd flambeaux no men carry Glimmer on the spot!

Now it is night in nest and kennel, And where was the wood, Just a dome of abyss is nodding Into solitude! --

These are the visions baffled Guido; Titian never told; Domenichino dropped the pencil, Powerless to unfold.

XXIX.