Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By A Book of Rhyme (1881). IV. English Stornelli. Marjory

Augusta Webster (1840–1894)

THE SLOW green wave comes curling from the bay

And leaps in spray along the sunny marge,

And steals a little more and more away,

And drowns the dulse, and lifts the stranded barge.

Leave me, strong tide, my smooth and yellow shore;

But the clear waters deepen more and more:

Leave me my pathway of the sands, strong tide;

Yet are the waves more fair than all they hide.

I love him, and I love him, and I love:

Oh heart, my love goes welling o’er the brim.

He makes my light more than the sun above,

And what am I save what I am to him?

All will, all hope I have, to him belong;

Oh heart, thou art too small for love so strong:

Oh heart, grow large, grow deeper for his sake;

Oh love him better, heart, or thou wilt break!

And we are lovers, lovers he and I:

Oh sweet dear name that angels envy us;

Lovers for now, lovers for by and by,

And God to hear us call each other thus.

Flow softly, river of our life, and fair;

We float together to the otherwhere:

Storm, river of our life, if storm must be,

We brunt thy tide together to that sea.

The road slopes on that leads us to the last,

And we two tread it softly, side by side;

’Tis a blithe count the milestones we have passed,

Step fitting step, and each of us for guide.

My love, and I thy love, our road is fair,

And fairest most because the other’s there:

Our road is fair, adown the harvest hill,

But fairest that we two are we two still.

We two, we two! the children’s smiles are dear—

Thank God how dear the bonny children’s smiles!—

But ’tis we two among our own ones here,

We two along life’s way through all the whiles.

To think if we had passed each other by;

And he not he apart, and I not I!

And oh to think if we had never known;

And I not I and he not he alone!

Go forth, my darling, in the wreath and veil;

My hand shall place them for thee; so goodbye.

Thou hast Love’s rose, and tend it without fail;

It withers, dear, if lovers let it lie.

Go, my own singing bird, and be his now;

And I am more than half as glad as thou.

Ah me! the singing birds that were our own

Fly forth and mate: and ’tis long life alone.