Thomas Gold Appleton

Places

IN the heart’s album there are treasured faces,
  Our household darlings, friends which are our own,
And with them favorite haunts and cherished places,
  So dear, they seem but made for us alone.

Old age remembers over misty distance
  The brook the boy once loved; its scent of flowers
Comes wafted from it yet with sweet persistence,
  And builds again for him those vanished hours.

He feels once more his bare feet in the stubble,
  His jointed fishing-rod, his bat and ball,
Till, flown from dreary days and thoughts of trouble,
  His pulses still sing music through it all.

Later, the sea-shore, haunt of vague emotion,
  Where his thoughts travelled on the gleaming wave,
Or rose in flowering hopes, as smitten ocean
  Shot jets of thundrous splendor round his cave.

The sacred path, which two once trod enchanted,
  And now but one, and he with faltering tread,
Feeling its grassy curves and hollows haunted
  By watching eyes, whose light is with the dead.

Then there are favorite nooks of early travel,
  Where dreaming idly on the summer grass,
He saw the Swiss cascades their threads unravel,
  And evening strike above the shadowy pass.

Clitumnus’ oxen wander by the plashing
  Of Virgil’s sacred river; and the bees
Pillage the heavy flowers in sunlight flashing
  While the doves murmur from the ilex-trees.

Here Como’s nightingale above the rowing
  Sings its lament; and, doubled in the lake,
He sees himself and boat, and softly showing,
  The clouds and distant hills a picture make.

Sorrento hangs there, crowned in memory’s vision,
  Starry with clustered orange, and below
An azure dream-world, soft with indecision,
  Where dulse and tangle round mosaics grow.

Such is the album memory fills with treasures,
  Hid in the heart, where love doth keep the key;
There in procession pass life’s pains and pleasures,
  Fresh and undying till it cease to be.