XXIV.

EVENING.

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon.

The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go.

A vastness, as a neighbor, came, -- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home, -- And so the night became.

COCOON.

Drab habitation of whom? Tabernacle or tomb, Or dome of worm, Or porch of gnome, Or some elf's catacomb?

SUNSET.

A sloop of amber slips away Upon an ether sea, And wrecks in peace a purple tar, The son of ecstasy.