Archæology

MEN find Time’s keepsakes of an age forgot
Hid in the nooks and crannies of the earth, —
A flint, a statue in a buried grot, —
And hail with reverence their second birth.
They hear, while standing with uncovered head,
Echoes of lives, whose souls, perhaps, are dead.
But we have chanced upon a wondrous thing,
The sweetness of a life that, slighted there,
Dreamed itself over from a bygone spring,
An idyl fresh from Arcady the fair, —
Dear, from the Golden Age our lore is lent,
Its heart still young, its essence still unspent.
“ How do you think it understood our speech ?
How did it know us as we loitered by ?
Do we remind it of those two whose reach
It fluttered from ? ” So questions she, but I:
“We woke it, dear; a sleeping beauty this,
That slept and waited for us both to kiss.”
W. T.