Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=341289" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Dialogue At Fiesole</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>Halt here awhile. That mossy-cushioned seat<br>Is for your queenliness a natural throne;<br>As I am fitly couched on this low sward,<br>Here at your feet.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>And I, in thought, at yours:<br>My adoration, deepest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>Deep, so deep,<br>I have no thought wherewith to fathom it;<br>Or, shall I say, no flight of song so high,<br>To reach the Heaven whence you look down on me,<br>My star, my far-off star!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE.<br>If far, yet fixed:<br>No shifting planet leaving you to seek<br>Where now it shines.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>A little light, if near,<br>Glows livelier than the largest orb in Heaven.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>But little lights burn quickly out, and then,<br>Another must be kindled. Stars gleam on,<br>Unreached, but unextinguished. . . . Now, the song.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>Yes, yes, the song: your music to my verse.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>In this sequestered dimple of the hill,<br>Forgotten by the furrow, none will hear:<br>Only the nightingales, that misconceive<br>The mid-day darkness of the cypresses<br>For curtained night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>And they will hush to hear<br>A sudden singing sweeter than their own.<br>Delay not the enchantment, but begin.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE<br>(singing).<br>If you were here, if you were here,<br>The cattle-bells would sound more clear;<br>The cataracts would flash and leap<br>More silvery from steep to steep;<br>The farewell of a rosier glow<br>Soften the summit of the snow;<br>The valley take a tenderer green;<br>In dewy gorge and dim ravine<br>The loving bramble-flowers embrace<br>The rough thorn with a gentler grace;<br>The gentian open bluer eyes,<br>In bluer air, to bluer skies:<br>The frail anemone delay,<br>The jonquil hasten on its way,<br>The primrose linger past its time,<br>The violet prolong its prime;<br>And every flower that seeks the light,<br>On Alpine lowland, Alpine height,<br>Wear April's smile without its tear,<br>If you were here; if you were here!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">If you were here, the Spring would wake<br>A fuller music in the brake.<br>The mottled misselthrush would pipe<br>A note more ringing, rich, and ripe;<br>The whitethroat peer above its nest<br>With brighter eye and downier breast;<br>The cuckoo greet the amorous year,<br>Chanting its joy without its jeer;<br>The lark betroth the earth and sky<br>With peals of heavenlier minstrelsy;<br>And every wildwood bird rejoice<br>On fleeter wing, with sweeter voice,<br>If you were here!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">If you were here, I too should feel<br>The moisture of the Springtide steal<br>Along my veins, and rise and roll<br>Through every fibre of my soul.<br>In my live breast would melt the snow,<br>And all its channels flush and flow<br>With waves of life and streams of song,<br>Frozen and silent all too long.<br>A something in each wilding flower,<br>Something in every scented shower,<br>Something in flitting voice and wing,<br>Would drench my heart and bid me sing:<br>Not in this feeble halting note,<br>But, like the merle's exulting throat,<br>With carol full and carol clear,<br>If you were here, if you were here.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>Hark! How the hills have caught the strain, and seem<br>Loth to surrender it, and now enclose<br>Its cadence in the silence of their folds.<br>Still as you sang, the verses had the wing<br>Of that which buoyed them, and your aery voice<br>Lifted my drooping music from the ground.<br>Now that you cease, there is an empty nest,<br>From which the full-fledged melody hath flown.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>Dare I with you contend in metaphor,<br>It might not be so fanciful to show<br>That nest, and eggs, and music, all are yours.<br>But modesty in poets is too rare,<br>To be reproved for error. Let me then<br>Be crowned full queen of song, albeit in sooth<br>I am but consort, owing my degree<br>To the real sceptred Sovereign at my side.<br>But now repay my music, and in kind.<br>Unfolding to my ear the youngest flower<br>Of song that seems to blossom all the year;<br>``Delay not the enchantment, but begin.''</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE<br>(reciting). Yet, you are here; yes, you are here.<br>There's not a voice that wakes the year,<br>In vale frequented, upland lone,<br>But steals some sweetness from your own.<br>When dream and darkness have withdrawn,<br>I feel you in the freshening dawn:<br>You fill the noonday's hushed repose;<br>You scent the dew of daylight's close.<br>The twilight whispers you are nigh;<br>The stars announce you in the sky.<br>The moon, when most alone in space,<br>Fills all the heavens with your face.<br>In darkest hour of deepest night,<br>I see you with the spirit's sight;<br>And slumber murmurs in my ear,<br>``Hush! she is here. Sleep! she is here.''</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>Hark how you bare your secret when you sing!<br>Imagination's universal scope<br>Can swift endue this gray and shapeless world<br>With the designs and colour of the sky.<br>What want you with our fixed and lumpish forms,<br>You, unconditioned arbiter of air?<br>``Yet, you are here; yes, you are here.'' The span<br>Of nimble fancy leaps the interval,<br>And brings the distant nearer than the near.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>Distance is nearer than proximity,<br>When distance longs, proximity doth not.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>The near is always distant to the mind<br>That craves for satisfaction of its end;<br>Nor doth the distance ever feel so far<br>As when the end is touched. Retard that goal,<br>Prolonging appetite beyond the feast<br>That feeds anticipation.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>Specious foil!<br>That parries every stroke before 'tis made.<br>Yet surfeit's self doth not more surely cloy<br>Than endless fasting.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE.<br>Still a swifter cure<br>Waits on too little than attends too much.<br>While disappointment merely woundeth Hope,<br>The deadly blow by disenchantment dealt<br>Strikes at the heart of Faith. O happy you,<br>The favourites of Fancy, who replace<br>Illusion with illusion, and conceive<br>Fresh cradles in the dark womb of the grave.<br>While we, prosaic victims, prove that time<br>Kills love while leaving loveless life alive,<br>You still, divinely duped, sing deathless love,<br>And with your wizard music, once again,<br>Make Winter Spring. Yet surely you forgive<br>That I have too much pity for the flowers<br>Children and poets cull to fling away,<br>To be an April nosegay.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>How you swell<br>The common chorus! Women, who are wronged<br>So roughly by men's undiscerning word,<br>As though one pattern served to show them all,<br>Should be more just to poets. These, in truth,<br>Diverge from one another nowise less<br>Than ``women,'' vaguely labelled: children some,<br>With childish voice and nature, lyric bards,<br>Weaklings that on life's threshold sweetly wail,<br>But never from that silvery treble pass<br>Into the note and chant of manliness.<br>Their love is like their verse, a frail desire,<br>A fluttering fountain falling feebly back<br>Into its shallow origin. Next there are<br>The poets of contention, wrestlers born,<br>Who challenge iron Circumstance, and fail:<br>Generous and strong, withal not strong enough,<br>Since lacking sinewy wisdom, hard as life.<br>The love of these is like the lightning spear,<br>And shrivels whom it touches. They consume<br>All things within their reach, and, last of all,<br>Their lonely selves; and then through time they tower,<br>Sublime but charred, and wear on their high fronts<br>The gloomy glory of the sunlit pine.<br>But the great gods of Song, in clear white light,<br>The radiance of their godhead, calmly dwell,<br>And with immutable cold starlike gaze<br>Scan both the upper and the under world,<br>As it revolves, themselves serenely fixed.<br>Their bias is the bias of the sphere,<br>That turns all ways, but turns away from none,<br>Save to return to it. They have no feud<br>With gods or men, the living or the dead,<br>The past or present, and their words complete<br>Life's incompleteness with a healing note.<br>For they are not more sensitive than strong,<br>More wise than tender; understanding all,<br>At peace with all, at peace with life and death,<br>And love that gives a meaning unto life<br>And takes from death the meaning and the sting:<br>At peace with hate, and every opposite.<br>Were I but one of these-presumptuous thought!-<br>Even you, the live fulfilment of such dreams<br>As these secrete, would hazard well your love<br>On my more largely loving. 'Twould be you,<br>Yes, even you, that first would flag and fail<br>In either of my choosing; you, whose wing<br>Would droop on mine and pray to be upborne.<br>And when my pinions did no more suffice<br>For that their double load, then softly down,<br>Softly and smoothly as descending lark<br>That hath fulfilled its rhapsody in Heaven,<br>And with diminished music must decline<br>To earthy sounds and concepts, I should curb<br>Illimitable longings to the range<br>Of lower aspiration. Were I such!-<br>But, since I am not-</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE.<br>Am not? Who shall say,<br>Save she who tests, and haply to her loss?<br>'Tis better left untested. Strange that you,<br>Who can imagine whatso thing you will,<br>Should lack imagination to appraise<br>Imagination at its topmost worth.<br>Now wield your native sceptre and extend<br>Your fancy forth where Florence overbrims<br>In eddies fairer even than herself.<br>Look how the landscape smiles complacently<br>At its own beauty, as indeed it may;<br>Villa and vineyard each a separate home,<br>Containing possibilities unseen,<br>Materials for your pleasure. Now disport!<br>Which homestead may it please my lord of song<br>To chalk for his, as those rough Frenchmen did<br>Who came with bow-legged Charles to justify<br>Savonarola's scourgeful prophecies?<br>Shall it be that one gazing in our face,<br>Not jealous of its beauty, but exposed<br>To all the wantonness of sun and air,<br>With roses girt, with roses garlanded,<br>And balustraded terrace topped with jars<br>Of clove carnations; unambitious roof,<br>Italian equivalent to house<br>Love in a cottage? Why, the very place<br>For her you once described! Wait! Let me see,<br>Can I recall the lines? Yes, thus they ran.<br>Do you remember them? Or are they now<br>A chronicle forgotten and erased<br>From that convenient palimpsest, the heart?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In dewy covert of her eyes<br>The secret of the violet lies;<br>The sun and wind caress and pair<br>In the lithe wavelets of her hair;<br>The fragrance of the warm soft south<br>Hovers about her honeyed mouth;<br>And, when she moves, she floats through air<br>Like zephyr-wafted gossamer.<br>Hers is no lore of dumb dead books;<br>Her learning liveth in her looks;<br>And still she shows, in meek replies,<br>Wisdom enough to deem you wise.<br>Her voice as soothing is and sweet<br>As whispers of the waving wheat,<br>And in the moisture of her kiss<br>Is April-like deliciousness.<br>Like gloaming-hour, she doth inspire<br>A vague, an infinite desire;<br>And, like the stars, though out of sight,<br>Filleth the loneliness of night.<br>Come how she may, or slow or fleet,<br>She brings the morning on her feet;<br>Gone, leaves behind a nameless pain,<br>Like the sadness of a silenced strain.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>A youthful dream.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE.<br>Yet memory can surmise<br>That young dream fruited to reality,<br>Then, like reality, was dream no more.<br>All dreams are youthful; you are dreaming still.<br>What lovely visions denizen your sleep!<br>Let me recall another; for I know<br>All you have written, thought, and felt, and much<br>You neither thought nor felt, but only sang.<br>A wondrous gift, a godlike gift, that breathes<br>Into our exiled clay unexiled lives,<br>Manlier than Adam, comelier than Eve.<br>That massive villa, we both know so well,<br>With one face set toward Settignano, one<br>Gazing at Bellosguardo, and its rear<br>Locked from the north by clustered cypresses,<br>That seem like fixed colossal sentinels,<br>And tower above its tower, but look not in,<br>Might be abode for her whom you conceived<br>In tropes so mystical, you must forgive<br>If recollection trips.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To dwell with her is calmly to abide<br>Through every change of time and every flux of tide.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In her the Present, Past, and Future meet,<br>The Father, and the Son, and dovelike Paraclete.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She holdeth silent intercourse with Night,<br>Still journeying with the stars, and shining with their light.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Her love, illumination; her embrace,<br>The sweep of angels' wings across a mortal's face.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Her lap is piled with autumn fruits, her brow<br>Crowned with the blossoming trails that smile from April's bough.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Like wintry stars that shine with frosty fire,<br>Her loftiness excites to elevate desire.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To love her is to burn with such a flame<br>As lights the lamp which bears the Sanctuary's name.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That lamp burns on for ever, day and night,<br>Before her mystic shrine. I am its acolyte.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE. <br>The merest foam of fancy; foam and spray.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE.<br>Foam-drift of fancy that hath ebbed away.<br>See how the very simile rebukes<br>Man's all unsealike longings! For confess,<br>While ocean still returns, the puny waves<br>Of mortal love are sucked into the sand,<br>Their motion felt, their music heard, no more.<br>Look when the vines are linking hands, and seem<br>As pausing from the dance of Spring, or just<br>Preparing to renew it, round and round,<br>On the green carpet of the bladed corn,<br>That spreads about their feet: corn, vine, and fig,<br>Almond and mulberry, cherry, and pear, and peach,<br>Not taught to know their place, but left to range<br>Up to the villa's walls, windows, and doors,<br>And peep into its life and smile good-day,<br>A portion of its homeliness and joy:<br>A poet's villa once, a poet's again,<br>If you but dream it such; a roof for her,<br>To whom you wrote-I wonder who she was-<br>This saucy sonnet; saucy, withal sweet,<br>And O, how true of the reflected love<br>You poets render to your worshippers.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">TRUE AS THE DIAL TO THE SUN. <br>You are the sun, and I the dial, sweet,<br>So you can mark on me what time you will.<br>If you move slowly, how can I move fleet?<br>And when you halt, I too must fain be still.<br>Chide not the cloudy humours of my brow,<br>If you behold no settled sunshine there:<br>Rather upbraid your own, sweet, and allow,<br>My looks cannot be foul if yours be fair.<br>Then from the heaven of your high witchery shine,<br>And I with smiles shall watch the hours glide by;<br>You have no mood that is not straightway mine;<br>My cheek but takes complexion from your eye.<br>All that I am dependeth so on you,<br>What clouds the sun must cloud the dial too.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>No man should quarrel with his Past, and I<br>Maintain no feud with mine. Do we not ripen,<br>Ripen and mellow in love, unto the close,<br>Thanks no more to the present than the past?<br>First love is fresh but fugitive as Spring,<br>A wilding flower no sooner plucked than faded;<br>And summer's sultry fervour ends in storm,<br>Recriminating thunder, wasteful tears,<br>And angry gleam of lightning menaces.<br>Give me October's meditative haze,<br>Its gossamer mornings, dewy-wimpled eves,<br>Dewy and fragrant, fragrant and secure,<br>The long slow sound of farmward-wending wains,<br>When homely Love sups quiet 'mong its sheaves,<br>Sups 'mong its sheaves, its sickle at its side,<br>And all is peace, peace and plump fruitfulness.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>Picture of all we dream and we desire:<br>Autumn's grave cheerfulness and sober bliss,<br>Rich resignation, humble constancy.<br>For, prone to bear the load piled up by life,<br>We, once youth's pasture season at an end,<br>Submit to crawl. Unbroken to the last,<br>You spurn the goad of stern taskmaster Time.<br>Even 'mid autumn harvest you demand<br>Returning hope and blossom of the Spring,<br>All seasons and sensations, and at once,<br>Or in too quick succession. Do we blame?<br>We envy rather the eternal youth<br>We cannot share. But youth is pitiless,<br>And, marching onward, neither asks nor seeks<br>Who falls behind. Thus women who are wise,<br>Beside their thresholds knitting homely gear,<br>Wave wistful salutation as you pass,<br>And think of you regretfully, when gone:<br>A soft regret, a sweet regret, that is<br>Only the mellow fruit of unplucked joy.<br>Now improvise some other simple strain,<br>That with harmonious cadence may attune<br>The vain and hazard discords of discourse.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>When Love was young, it asked for wings,<br>That it might still be roaming;<br>And away it sped, by fancy led,<br>Through dawn, and noon, and gloaming.<br>Each daintiness that blooms and blows<br>It wooed in honeyed metre,<br>And when it won the sweetest sweet,<br>It flew off to a sweeter:<br>When Love was young.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When Love was old, it craved for rest,<br>For home, and hearth, and haven;<br>For quiet talks round sheltered walks,<br>And long lawns smoothly shaven.<br>And what Love sought, at last it found,<br>A roof, a porch, a garden,<br>And from a fond unquestioning heart<br>Peace, sympathy, and pardon,<br>When Love was old.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>Simple, in sooth, and haply true: withal,<br>Too, too autumnal even for my heart.<br>I never weary of your vernal note.<br>Carol again, and sing me back my youth<br>With the redundant melodies of Spring.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">HE.<br>I breathe my heart in the heart of the rose,<br>The rose that I pluck and send you,<br>With a prayer that the perfume its leaves enclose<br>May kiss, and caress, and tend you:<br>Caress and tend you till I can come,<br>To the garden where first I found you,<br>And the thought that as yet in the rose is dumb<br>Can ripple in music round you.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O rose, that will shortly be her guest,<br>You may well look happy, at leaving:<br>Will you lie in the cradle her snowy breast<br>Doth rock with its gentle heaving?<br>Will you mount the throne of her hazel hair,<br>That waves like a summer billow,<br>Or be hidden and hushed, at nightfall prayer,<br>In the folds of her dimpled pillow?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And when she awakes at dawn to feel<br>If you have been dreaming with her,<br>Then the whole of your secret, sweet rose, reveal,<br>And say I am coming thither:<br>And that when there is silence in earth and sky,<br>And peace from the cares that cumber,<br>She must not ask if your leaves or I<br>Be clasped in her perfumed slumber.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">SHE. <br>Give me your hand; and, if you will, keep mine<br>Engraffed in yours, as slowly thus we skirt<br>La Doccia's dark declivity, and make<br>Athwart Majano's pathless pines a path<br>To lead us onward haply where it may.<br>Lo! the Carrara mountains flush to view,<br>That in the noonday were not visible.<br>Shall we not fold this comfort to our hearts,<br>Humbly rejoiced to think as there are heights<br>Seen only in the sunset, so our lives,<br>If that they lack not loftiness, may wear<br>A glow of glory on their furrowed fronts,<br>Until they faint and fade into the night!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Alfred+Austin">Alfred Austin</a><div class=q>
<img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share">
<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=341289" data-title="A Dialogue At Fiesole de Alfred Austin" data-description="HE. 
Halt here awhile. That mossy-cushioned seat
Is for your queenliness a natural throne;
As I am fitly couched on this low sward,
Here at your feet.

SHE. 
And I, in thought, at yours:
My adoration, deepest.

HE.
Deep, so deep,
I have no thought..."></div>
</div>
</div>