By A Child's Bed

She breathd deep,     And stepped from out life's stream     Upon the shore of sleep;     And parted from the earthly noise,     Leaving her world of toys,     To dwell a little in a dell of dream.     Then brooding on the love I hold so free,     My fond possessions come to be     Clouded with grief;     These fairy kisses,     This archness innocent,     Sting me with sorrow and disturbed content:     I think of what my portion might have been;     A dearth of blisses,     A famine of delights,     If I had never had what now I value most;     Till all I have seems something I have lost;     A desert underneath the garden shows,     And in a mound of cinders roots the rose.     Here then I linger by the little bed,     Till all my spirit's sphere,     Grows one half brightness and the other dead,     One half all joy, the other vague alarms;     And, holding each the other half in fee,     Floats like the growing moon     That bears implicitly     Her lessening pearl of shadow     Clasped in the crescent silver of her arms.