Again the voices of the hunting horns

And the new moon, low lying on the hills,

Tell that the summer night is on its way.—

O languid heart, shalt thou much longer watch

This pale procession of the silent hours

Melt into shadows of unending years?

Much longer feed on yearning and despair

And all the anguish of departed time?

Tomorrow is as yesterday; today

No nearer than the morning when there stood

In Leda's palace, asking for my hand,

Tall Menelaus with his yellow hair;

No nearer now than the first time these hands

Dared linger in caress upon the curls

Of him whose dark eyes laughed their love to mine.

'Tis only as if one short, restless sleep

Lay over the wide chasm of the years

Beyond which loom lost faith and ruined Troy.

The night wind brings, as twenty summers since,

The silver-breasted swallows from the Nile

To quiet Sparta, nestled in her hills,

Locked inland from the voices of the sea;

And far across the porticos I hear

The ivory shuttle singing in the loom

'Midst maidens' chatter, as in olden days;

And men still murmur as they pass me by:

"Lo, look on her, the wonder of the world,

Beauteous Helen, LacedÆmon's Queen!"

I watch them gaze intently on my face

As they would keep it in their memory

Forever, and the very while they gaze

I see the flame of Troy gleam in their eyes.

I think sometimes I have already passed

Into the kingdom of untroubled death,

And wandering lonely amongst them I knew

In Hellas or that land beyond the seas,

Behold each shadow as it passes by

Shrink half involuntarily, and turn,

And veil its face and vanish in the gloom.

Whilst out of that dim distance whence my steps

Are moving and to which they shall return

After an interval of endless years,

There comes a voice that calls me from afar:

"Art thou not Helen, dowered of the gods

With all that man can covet? Wert thou not

Created the most beautiful of earth,

And is not beauty wisdom, wisdom power?

What hast thou done with their almighty gift?"

And then, ere I would answer, silence falls

Around me, and the dark divides, and I

See the blue twilight on the Spartan hills.