·RENASCENCE·
·A·BOOK·of·
·VERSE·
RENASCENCE
⁂ This Edition on Large Paper is limited to Sixty-fivecopies for England and Thirty-five for America.This copy is No. 45 of the English Edition.
BY
·London: ELKIN·
·MATHEWS·AT·THE·
·SIGN·OF·THE·BODLEY
·HEAD·IN·VIGO·ST·1891·
THIS sheaf that I have bound, of mingled grain,
Beneath the noon to give a spot of shade,
Where might we sit and mark, before they fade,
The fleeting lights across life’s dappled plain;
Ere with its treasured had Time’s rolling wain—
Piled up with memories, and thoughts unsaid,
With hopes and fears in trembling leaf and blade—
Turns sun-ward, where the harvest-home is made.
Perchance the tangled stems some flowers enfold,
Not all unmeet the brows of her to wreath,
Who with me bore the burden of the morn.
If yet the scarlet please not, on the corn,
Love’s blue is stedfast, and thy name in gold
Is writ by love’s wing-feather underneath.
OF the poems in this book, the whole of those includedin Part I. are now printed for the first time.
Of the rest, “The Sirens Three,” “Thoughts in aHammock,” “A Herald of Spring,” and the Rondeau—“Acrossthe Fields,” all appeared with designs of mine,as decorative pages, in “The English Illustrated Magazine,”“The Sirens Three” being afterwards issued, withthe illustrations, in book-form, by Messrs. Macmillan andCo., whom I have to thank for permission to reprint itwith the others here.
“Flora’s Feast,” with coloured designs of the flowersto each couplet, has been published as a Christmas bookby Messrs. Cassell and Co., at whose consent it re-appears.
I regret there should have been any delay in the appearanceof the book, which has been owing to the illnessof the engraver who had charge of some of the blocks.
Walter Crane.