White Cloud Kansas Chief

Choice Poetry

Air Castles.

Did you ever build air castles, darling,
In your waking, waking dreams?
Did you ever build a palace of spirits
And inhabited with gems?
And garnished with gold
To embellish your fairy within?
Till you gilded the world with a rainbow,
And then, when your proud
And proudly your mantle so fit,
With its glittering turrets,
Did you think—'tis only of air!'
Oh! my but we all are dreamers,
Till the arrowy shafts reared make sway
Till the cloudy foundations have vanished
In the bright light of the mortal day.
I have builded my air notions, darling:
And roomed in their dim, dreary walls;
Labyrinths
Of deeps of the mortal falls:
The shadowy dwellings are holy,
This dream of thy bonds is more true
Then the spotless of those in the real life
While the heaven that's above is more.
If ever you build, dear,—my darling:
Those structures of beauty and might,
Let me tell you, ere dwelling within them
And loving their splendor, beware!
For you'll find that 'tis only the spectral
That greets you with chilly, clammy hand;
And you'll mourn, when too late to recall them
His
Dim!
The most meet that we build as such dwellings:
The road that we lead in our book,
The friends that we're trusted forsake us,
Our suit madly awakes!
Give love to the tried and the truant
Turn your eyes from the cloud-realm away,
Then you'll faint not, tho' wearied with journeying
Neath the sun of the actual day.