Epilogue To A Mother, On Seeing Her Smile Repeated In Her Daughter's Eyes

A thousand songs I might have made         Of You, and only You;     A thousand thousand tongues of fire     That trembled down a golden wire         To lamp the night with stars, to braid     The morning bough with dew.     Within the greenwood girl and boy         Had loiter'd to their lure,     And men in cities closed their books     To dream of Spring and running brooks     And all that ever was of joy         For manhood to abjure.     And I'd have made them strong, so strong         Outlasting towers and towns--     Millennial shepherds 'neath the thorn     Had piped them to a world reborn,     And danced Delight the dale along         And up the daisied downs.     A thousand songs I might have made...         But you required them not;     Content to reign your little while     Ere, abdicating with a smile,     You pass'd into a shade, a shade         Immortal--and forgot!