Mine was a dream of strange delight,
And did not vanish with the night.
Methought a Voice was leading me
Thro' dusk walks of a lonesome wood--
A dedicated solitude--
A voice that was a mystery,
Like the voices faint and mild,
We have heard, and evermore
Seem in sabbath hours to hear,
When the heart, half reconciled
To the losses we deplore,
Meets again with love and fear--
Fear subdued, and love chastised--
The dead, till death too little prized;
When they, for whom we did not live,
In heaven still love us, still forgive,
And voices to the heart are brought
Again in dreams, and dreamy thought.
On wandered we, in vision vague,
Above the trembling line of Maige!
What wonder, if the pleasant voice,
The leading music of my dream
Changed as we glided by the stream,
And seemed to murmur and rejoice,
As, sleepless in the moon--beams, smiled
The stream that soothed me, man and child!
And then uprose, like fairy throngs
A crowd of Fancies fugitive--
Such forms as for a moment live
In seeming life, and glance, and give
Their beauty to the eye, revealing
A charm, that is a sense, a feeling--
--Not unlike the odour left,
When the loose wind's pleasant theft
On a bank, with may--dews wet,
Stirs the wakeful violet--
Fancies, blossomings of love,
Like the breathing from above,
That is felt, and that belongs
To one minstrel, only one--
To the song of many songs,
To the song of Solomon!
Dusk Night, though dark, how beautiful!
Thine the consoling sounds, that lull
Men happy or unfortunate,
Raise up the sad, calm the elate!
And thine alike o'er all to sweep
The curtain of mysterious sleep;
And thine, while in the cloud we lie,
The dreams, too bright for waking eye--
The heaven, that for a moment seems
Before us in the spell of dreams!
Whose was the voice that led me on?
Who walked with me that pleasant wood?
The voice, her voice--her very tone--
Her unforgotten words renewed--
The radiant eyes--the folded hair--
The lips--the love reposing there--
Day wakes me from the conscious trance,
And still before my eyes I trace
The lines of that beloved face--
And that transfigured countenance!