The Portland Daily Press

POETRY.

Day Dreams.

New England hills have given her cheeks
Their fair, clear tints of rose;
A circle of New England hills
Bounds all the world she knows:-
With simple joys and household tasks the days begin and close.

A grave, shy maiden, strictly reared,
In puritanical way,
With childhood's faith and innocence,
Still gleaming in her eyes,
The grace of dawning womanhood investing speech and guise.

Her life hath little charm or change
That other eyes can see;
Close cramped within the forms and creeds
Of her stern ancestry,
The barrier lines that guard her youth leave naught but fancy free.

And yet unknown to those around,
Some happy fate or chance
Weaves thick with threads of shining gold
The gray of circumstance:
She lives within a world of dreams and strays of old romance.

When all the dark and dew of night
Are touched with Eastern glows.
Where sunrise lights the quiet fields
And tips the hills she knows.
She dreams of dawns that far away flush the wide seas with rose.

Of leagues of forest lit with sun
And billowed by the breeze
Of snowy summits red with morn,
Of crimsoned argosies,
Of cities flashing back the day, of golden skies and seas.

When sunset castled in the West,
Beset by gathering night
Defies a host of shadows gray
With shafts of splendid light.
She sees in vistaed glows a Heaven miraculously bright.

And in the hush and gold of noon
There comes enchanted hours
When purple mists are on the hills
And skies have cloudy towers,
And tropic richness gleams among her garden's scarlet flowers

The while she plies her homely tasks
In summer afternoons,
When shadows slant across the grass.
And birds sing softer tunes
And yellow light is on the fields; waifs of old songs and runes

Float through her thought and Fancy sees
Betwixt the meadows wide.
Between the roadsides gay with flowers
A knightly horseman ride.
The sunlight on his plume and shield, his sheathed sword at his side.

He rides to castled cloudland far
Beyond the bounding hills
Where fabled beauty lives again
Whene'er the dreamer wills
And where the dreamy lotus blooms, that cure for human ills.

And she, the lady of his love,
Waits by the rustic gate:
Above her rise the hollyhocks
In spires of crimson state,
And odors from the rose's heart the passing breezes freight.

Her wide dark eyes gaze far away.
Her work falls on her knee
And magic visions, silver-winged
Around her float and flee:
The summer air, the summer light are full of sorcery.

Ah! vain to mimic fancy's flight
With subtle arts of rhyme.
For her the bells of fairyland
Their wondrous measures chime;
The grace and glory of romance live in the present time.

I lay aside my useless pen
What words of mine can show
That far-off wonderland of dreams,
Its towers of clouds and snow.
And its eternal blooms and calms that none but dreamers know?