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| MY days are full of pleasant memories | |
| Of all those women sweet, | |
| Whom I have known! How tenderly their eyes | |
| Flash thro’ the days—too fleet!— | |
| Which long ago went by with sun and rain, | 5 |
| Flowers, or the winter snow; | |
| And still thro’ memory’s palace-halls are fain | |
| In rustling robes to go! | |
| Or wed, or widow’d, or with milkless breasts, | |
| Around those women stand, | 10 |
| Like mists that linger on the mountain crests | |
| Rear’d in a phantom land; | |
| And love is in their mien and in their look, | |
| And from their lips a stream | |
| Of tender words flows, smooth as any brook, | 15 |
| And softer than a dream: | |
| And, one by one, holding my hands, they say | |
| Things of the years agone; | |
| And each head will a little turn away, | |
| And each one still sigh on; | 20 |
| Because they think such meagre joy we had; | |
| For love was little bold, | |
| And youth had store, and chances to be glad, | |
| And squander’d so his gold. | |
| Blue eyes, and gray, and blacker than the sloe, | 25 |
| And dusk and golden hair, | |
| And lips that broke in kisses long ago, | |
| Like sun-kiss’d flowers, are there; | |
| And warm fire-side, and sunny orchard wall, | |
| And river-brink and bower, | 30 |
| And wood and hill, and morning and day-fall, | |
| And every place and hour! | |
| And each on each a white unclouded brow | |
| Still as a sister bends, | |
| As they would say, “love makes us kindred now, | 35 |
| Who sometime were his friends.” | |
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