Three Sunsets and Other Poems

The pictures, with their ruddy light,
Are changed to dust and ashes white,
And I am left alone with night

Nay! In those words there rings from other years
The echo of a long low cry,
Where a proud spirit wrestles with its tears
In loneliest agony

Here from the world I win release,
Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude,
Break in to mar the holy peace
Of this great solitude.
Here may the silent tears I weep

“Alas!” she sighed. “For what can Woman do?
Her life is aimless, and her death unknown:
Hemmed in by social forms she pines in vain

The heavy hours of night went by,
And silence quickened into sound,
And light slid up the eastern sky,

So by degrees his spirit bent

He saw her once, and in the glance,
A moment’s glance of meeting eyes,