An Old Picture

THERE are times when a dream delicious Steals into a musing hour, Like a face with love capricious That peeps from a woodland bower; And one dear scene comes changeless; A wooded hill and a river; A deep, cool bend, where the lilies end, And the elm-tree shadows quiver. And I lie on the brink there, dreaming That the life I live is a dream; That the real is but the seeming, And the true is the sun-flecked stream. Beneath me, the perch and the bream sail past In the dim cool depths of the river; The struggling fly breaks the mirrored sky And the elm-tree shadows quiver. There are voices of children away on the hill; There are bees thro' the flag-flowers humming; The lighter-man calls to the lock, and the mill On the farther side is drumming. And I sink to sleep in my dream of a dream, In the grass by the brink of a river, Where the voices blend and the lilies end And the elm-tree shadows quiver. Like a gift from the past is the kindly dream, For the sorrow and passion and pain Are adrift like the leaves on the breast of the stream, And the child-life comes again. O, the sweet sweet pain of a joy that died— Of a pain that is joy forever! O, the life that died in the stormy tide That was once my sun-flecked river.