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From “The Light of the Harem”
ALAS! how light a cause may move | |
| Dissension between hearts that love! | |
| Hearts that the world in vain has tried, | |
| And sorrow but more closely tied; | |
| That stood the storm when waves were rough, | 5 |
| Yet in a sunny hour fall off, | |
| Like ships that have gone down at sea, | |
| When heaven was all tranquillity! | |
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| A something light as air,—a look, | |
| A word unkind or wrongly taken,— | 10 |
| O, love that tempests never shook, | |
| A breath, a touch like this has shaken! | |
| And ruder words will soon rush in | |
| To spread the breach that words begin; | |
| And eyes forget the gentle ray | 15 |
| They wore in courtship’s smiling day; | |
| And voices lose the tone that shed | |
| A tenderness round all they said; | |
| Till fast declining, one by one, | |
| The sweetnesses of love are gone, | 20 |
| And hearts, so lately mingled, seem | |
| Like broken clouds,—or like the stream, | |
| That smiling left the mountain’s brow, | |
| As though its waters ne’er could sever, | |
| Yet, ere it reach the plain below, | 25 |
| Breaks into floods that part forever. | |
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| O you, that have the charge of Love, | |
| Keep him in rosy bondage bound, | |
| As in the Fields of Bliss above | |
| He sits, with flowerets fettered round;— | 30 |
| Loose not a tie that round him clings, | |
| Nor ever let him use his wings; | |
| For even an hour, a minute’s flight | |
| Will rob the plumes of half their light. | |
| Like that celestial bird,—whose nest | 35 |
| Is found beneath far Eastern skies,— | |
| Whose wings, though radiant when at rest, | |
| Lose all their glory when he flies! | |
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