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Romance
YOU bells in the steeple, ring out your changes, | |
| How many soever they be, | |
| And let the brown meadow-lark’s note as he ranges | |
| Come over, come over to me. | |
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| Yet birds’ clearest carol by fall or by swelling | 5 |
| No magical sense conveys, | |
| And bells have forgotten their old art of telling | |
| The fortune of future days. | |
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| “Turn again, turn again,” once they rang cheerily | |
| While a boy listened alone: | 10 |
| Made his heart yearn again, musing so wearily | |
| All by himself on a stone. | |
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| Poor bells! I forgive you; your good days are over, | |
| And mine, they are yet to be; | |
| No listening, no longing, shall aught, aught discover: | 15 |
| You leave the story to me. | |
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| The foxglove shoots out of the green matted heather, | |
| Preparing her hoods of snow; | |
| She was idle, and slept till the sunshiny weather: | |
| O, children take long to grow. | 20 |
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| I wish, and I wish, that the spring would go faster, | |
| Nor long summer bide so late; | |
| And I could grow on like the foxglove and aster, | |
| For some things are ill to wait. | |
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| I wait for the day when dear hearts shall discover. | 25 |
| While dear hands are laid on my head; | |
| “The child is a woman, the book may close over, | |
| For all the lessons are said.” | |
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| I wait for my story—the birds cannot sing it, | |
| Not one, as he sits on the tree; | 30 |
| The bells cannot ring it, but long years, O, bring it! | |
| Such as I wish it to be. | |
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