Select Poetry.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 15, Issue 749, 3 January 1870, Page 4

Select Poetry.

.Kyjpjss fi/I VIOLETS. Her hands are cold, her face is white j No more her pulses come and go; Her eyes are shut to life and light: Fold the white vestures, snow on snow. And lay her where the violets blow. But not beneath a graven stone, To plead foi tears with alien eyes ; A slender cross of wood alone Shall say that here a maiden lies In peace beneath the peaceful skies. And grey old trees of hugest limb Shall wheel their circling shadows round, ■To make the scorching sunlight dimThat drinks the greenness from the ground, And drop their dead leaves on her mound. lyhen o'er the boughs the squirrels run, And through the leaves the robins call, And, ripening in the autumn sun, The acorns and the chestnuts fall, Doubt not that she will heed them all. for. her the morning choir shall sing Its matins from the branches high, And every minstrel voice of spring That thrills beneath the April sky, Shall greet her with its earliest cry. When, turning round their dial track, Eastward the lengthened shadows pass, Her little mourners clad in black, The cricket sliding- through the grass, Shall pipe for her an evening mass. At last the rootlets of thf. trees Shall find the prison where she lies, And bear the buried dust they seize In leaves and blossoms to the skies; So may'the soul that warmed it rise! If any, bom of kindlier blood, Should ask what maiden lies below, Say only this: " A tender bud, That tried to blossom in the snow, Lies withered where the violets blow." Oliver Wendell Holmes.