Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique! Whether in melancholy marble palaces In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek; Or, further than the bright and sun-pursuing beak Of argosy might fare, beheld the empresses Of lost Lemuria; or behind the lattices Alhambran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique Of wan, mysterious women!—Mirrors, mirrors old, Mirrors immutable, impassable as Fate, Your bosoms held the perished beauty of the past Nearer than straining love might ever hope to hold; And fleeing faces, lips too phantom-frail to last, Found in your magic depth a life re-duplicate. |