WHAT a pure and chastened splendor,
What a grace of joyance tender,
Like to starlight or to moonlight,
Melting into fairy Junelight,
Sleeps my little lady sweetly,--
In the air that answers meetly,
With each soul-illumined feature,
Which the lovely, winsome creature
Lifts toward us so demurely,
That despite their candor, surely
Something of an elfish slyness
Sparkles 'round their shadowed shyness,
Though a pose that's sometimes stately,
(Baby brows thrown back sedately,)
Charms us by a look that such is,
She might be a wee Grand Duchess!
But anon that aspect changes,
Through all moods her spirit ranges.
Free and far as Ariel pinions
O'er a warlock's weird dominions;
Happy fields of dim romances:
Woods wherein an elve-troop dances
'Neath a noon of splendid trances,
Culling flowers, or chanting lowly
Songs of golden melancholy;
Or in stretch of wildest dreamings,
(Holding true their gracious seemings,)
Wafted into blissful vision
Of some rarer realm Elysian.
Well I know that mark the yearning
Through her snowy eyelids burning,
Shadowed by those midnight lashes,
(Quickly closed when aught abashes,
And as quickly flashed asunder,
When swift anger lightens under,)
How supreme the hidden forces
Blindly struggling at their sources
In her depths of nascent being:
Insight, but half-born to seeing,
Faint perceptions, intuitions,
And soft-murmuring admonitions,
Toned and mellowed down so finely
That their voices breathe divinely.
Ha! but see, our dainty fairy
Freed from thought, or dreamings airy,
All an embryo flirt's beguiling,
Wooes us in her roguish smiling,
Rippled into silvery laughter,
With arch glances levelled after,
Coy, coquettish, gay, capricious
Sprite! thy every moods delicious;
Yet amid those spirit-phases
Whereupon thy poet gazes,
There is one that steals above thee;
Dewy pure from heavens that love thee.
'Tis not when thy heart is lightest,
'Tis not when thy glance is brightest,
But when sober Contemplation
Near thee takes her pensive station,
While a strange ecstatic quiet
Follows on thy childish riot.
Lo! her trifling fancies vanished,--
Lo! her baby bearing banished,
She has grown so sweetly earliest
That I'm sure the harshest, sternest
Cynic who should chance to meet her,
Must with fond caresses greet her!
Introspective, deep surmising,
Glow her eyes like moonbeams rising,
And across her face, where wonder
Seems with tremulous awe to ponder,
Smiles a glory, as if angels
Whispered her their soft evangels!
So that for the moment losing
Time and place while on her musing,
One might say, this eerie creature
Hardly owns our earth-born nature,
For she's changeling, fay and fairy,
In a word, all things that vary
Most in wizard transformations,
And the round of weird creations!
