Love: 

Our love is not a fading earthly flower: 
Its wingèd seed dropped down from Paradise, 
And, nursed by day and night, by sun and shower, 
Doth momently to fresher beauty rise. 
To us the leafless autumn is not bare, 
Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green: 
Our summer hearts make summer's fulness where 
No leaf or bud or blossom may be seen: 
For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie, 
Love,--whose forgetfulness is beauty's death, 
Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I 
Into the infinite freedom openeth, 
And makes the body's dark and narrow grate 
The wide-flung leaves of Heaven's palace-gate.


To a Friend:
 
True as the sun's own work, but more refined, 
It tells of love behind the artist's eye, 
Of sweet companionships with earth and sky, 
And summers stored, the sunshine of the mind. 
What peace! Sure, ere you breathe, the fickle wind 
Will break its truce and bend that grass-plume high, 
Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly 
That flits a more luxurious perch to find. 
Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall, 
A serene moment, deftly caught and kept 
To make immortal summer on my wall. 
Had he who drew such gladness ever wept? 
Ask rather could he else have seen at all, 
Or grown in Nature's mysteries an adept? 


Untitled:

Oh what is so rare as a day in June? 
Then if ever come perfect days, 
When heaven tries earth if it be in tune, 
And over it softly her warm ear lays. 
Whether we look or whether we listen, 
We hear life murmur and we see it glisten. 
Every clod feels a stir of might, 
An instinct within it that reaches and towers 
And groping blindly above it for light 
Comes to a soul in grass and flowers.