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| IN the heart’s album there are treasured faces, | |
| Our household darlings, friends which are our own, | |
| And with them favorite haunts and cherished places, | |
| So dear, they seem but made for us alone. | |
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| Old age remembers over misty distance | 5 |
| The brook the boy once loved; its scent of flowers | |
| Comes wafted from it yet with sweet persistence, | |
| And builds again for him those vanished hours. | |
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| He feels once more his bare feet in the stubble, | |
| His jointed fishing-rod, his bat and ball, | 10 |
| Till, flown from dreary days and thoughts of trouble, | |
| His pulses still sing music through it all. | |
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| Later, the sea-shore, haunt of vague emotion, | |
| Where his thoughts travelled on the gleaming wave, | |
| Or rose in flowering hopes, as smitten ocean | 15 |
| Shot jets of thundrous splendor round his cave. | |
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| The sacred path, which two once trod enchanted, | |
| And now but one, and he with faltering tread, | |
| Feeling its grassy curves and hollows haunted | |
| By watching eyes, whose light is with the dead. | 20 |
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| Then there are favorite nooks of early travel, | |
| Where dreaming idly on the summer grass, | |
| He saw the Swiss cascades their threads unravel, | |
| And evening strike above the shadowy pass. | |
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| Clitumnus’ oxen wander by the plashing | 25 |
| Of Virgil’s sacred river; and the bees | |
| Pillage the heavy flowers in sunlight flashing | |
| While the doves murmur from the ilex-trees. | |
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| Here Como’s nightingale above the rowing | |
| Sings its lament; and, doubled in the lake, | 30 |
| He sees himself and boat, and softly showing, | |
| The clouds and distant hills a picture make. | |
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| Sorrento hangs there, crowned in memory’s vision, | |
| Starry with clustered orange, and below | |
| An azure dream-world, soft with indecision, | 35 |
| Where dulse and tangle round mosaics grow. | |
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| Such is the album memory fills with treasures, | |
| Hid in the heart, where love doth keep the key; | |
| There in procession pass life’s pains and pleasures, | |
| Fresh and undying till it cease to be. | 40 |
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