A Live-Oak Leaf

"Now as the twilight's doubtful interval          Closes with night's accomplished certainty,          A wizard wind goes crying eerily;"

"One tone is mute within the starry singing,         The unison fulfilled, complete before;         One chord within the music sounds no more"

"Above its domes the gulfs accumulate          To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;          But here the buried waters take no"

"The cherry-snows are falling now;          Down from the blossom-clouded sky         Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough,          In widely"

"Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met     Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky,     And twilight in the east, a doubt as yet,     S"

"The Text is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. i. p. 71, 'given from two MS. copies, transmitted from Scotland.' Herd had a very similar bal"