POETRY.

ITALY.

I READ of Italy the other night, And the old longing welled up, the old pain. I thought time had quelled it, every year Slowing the pulsing blood of that desire Until there rested only in my heart A quiet pool of colour—Italy

But that security was false. Even so A gusty passion may die down, and leave The deep-branched forest-growth of love in silence, For years no leaf atremble, not a sigh In the hanging fronds ; all in eternal stillness I Sleep—sleep--in the twilight of the trees, Until almost their origin and strength Are half-forgotten, so perfect do they stand, So serene—the very world seems empty.

Then on a sudden there is heard, high up, Over the furthest reaches of the wood, Strange argument, and bandying of noise, Voices of foliage, a myriad tongues Loosened with fear, passing anxiety • Rapidly on, swiftly as flame, from bough to bough.

Until the trunks sway, and the mossy buttresses

Groan in the earth, and locked branches shriek—

Passion is loose again in the forest of love I Abi I To tread Italian soil but once How does a lover feel, who, virgin-hearted, And fed with romance of an earlier day, Finds on a night of June a laughing girl

Fairer than all he dreamed of ? How can be told

The lyric of his heart, when in response To his importuning glances, he beholds Her laughter subtilizing into shades Matching the moonlight when its rays begin To touch the fading daylight with a life Strangely exterior, yet giving it Magic for sleep, a soul to its extinction ?

Such is the smile of Italy to me, Coming across the waters from the South.

And should the June night aid him, would that boy, Drunken on warmth that lingers in the grass And perfume of the seeded hay, heart-dazzled By western lights that, sinking behind the trees, Make them cuprous domes of secrecy Where oracles lurk, batlike, in their gloom ; Would he have courage to approach her there, Challenge that beacon of the setting sun Deep in her eyes, touch the Cassandra bosom, That fiery-cold and wondrous unexplored, That valley of the mystery ? Would he dare Assault the darkness-fostering mouth, aspire To deeper midnight glories, intimate joys That should be a potion for youth, to change it swiftly With the drug called knowledge ? And so, heart to heart, Should they upon the summer night find rest, Sink into the silence, and be merged In the sleep of the birds, the darkness before dawn, And the sweet chill air that follows up the stars

As they fade from the eastern morning ; should those

lovers Wake then, and rise into the light of day, Would they find the whole world changed about them, Fused, like their thoughts, in passion's vast alembio And so made unified and crystalline, Yet changed and terrible with beauty, glowing clear, The unforeseen Life's mystery in the midst ?

And should I come thus to Italy, to drink

Deep from her eyes, as Leonardo once Drank from the Gioconda, and thenceforward Go more secretly about the world, Hugging a deeper wisdom in my heart, And in my soul a never-dying love

Richer than its beloved—Italy ? Rims= CHURCH.