Love's Widowhood and Other Poems Author:Alfred Austin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A WINTRY PICTURE Now where the bare sky spans the landscape bare, Up long brown fallows creeps the slow brown team, Scattering the seed-corn that must sleep a... more »nd dream, Till by Spring's carillon awakened there. Ruffling the tangles of his thicket hair, The stripling yokel steadies now the beam, Now strides erect with cheeks that glow and gleam, And whistles shrewdly to the spacious air. Lured onward to the distance dim and blear, The road crawls weary of the travelled miles : The kine stand cowering in unmoving files; The shrewmouse rustles through the bracken sere; And, in the sculptured woodland's leafless aisles, The robin chants the vespers of the year. I CHIDE NOT AT THE SEASONS I Chide not at the seasons, for if Spring With backward look refuses to be fair, My Love still more than April makes me sing, And shows May blossom in the bleak March air. Should Summer fail its tryst, or June delay To wreathe my porch with roses red and pale, Her breath is sweeter than the new-mown hay, Her touch more clinging than the woodbine's trail. Let Autumn like a spendthrift waste the year, And reap no harvest save the fallen leaves, My Love still ripeneth, though she grows not sere, And smiles enthroned on our piled-up sheaves. And last, when miser Winter docks the days, She warms my hearth and keeps my hopes ablaze. A DIALOGUE AT FIESOLE Halt here awhile. That mossy-cushioned seat Is for your queenliness a natural throne; As I am fitly couched on this low sward, Here at your feet. And I, in thought, at yours : My adoration, deepest. Deep, so deep, I have no thought wherewith to fathom it; Or, shall I say, no flight of song so high, To reach the Heaven whence you look down on me, My star, my far-off star ! If far, yet fixed ...« less