Louisa P. Smith

I ’VE pleasant thoughts that memory brings, in moments free from care,

Of a fairy-like and laughing girl, with roses in her hair;

Her smile was like the star-light of summer’s softest skies,

And worlds of joyousness there shone, from out her witching eyes.

Her looks were looks of melody, her voice was like the swell

Of sudden music, notes of mirth, that of wild gladness tell;

She came like spring, with pleasant sounds of sweetness and of mirth,

And her thoughts were those wild, flowery ones, that linger not on earth.

A quiet goodness beam’d amid the beauty of her face,

And all she said and did, was with its own instinctive grace;

She seem’d as if she thought the world a good and pleasant one,

And her light spirit saw no ill, in all beneath the sun.

I ’ve dream’d of just such creatures, but they never met my view

’Mid the sober, dull reality, in their earthly form and hue.

And her smile came gently over me, like spring’s first scented airs,

And made me think life was not all a wilderness of cares.

I know not of her destiny, or where her smile now strays,

But the thought of her comes o’er me, with my own lost sunny days,

With moonlight hours, and far-off friends, and many pleasant things,

That have gone the way of all the earth on time’s resistless wings.