Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920.

Portrait of a Lady

HER eyes are sunlit hazel:

Soft shadows round them play.

Her dark hair, smoothly ordered,

Is faintly touched with grey.

Full of a gentle brightness

Her look and language are:—

Kind tongue that never wounded,

Sweet mirth that leaves no scar.

Her dresses are soft lilac

And silver-pearly grey.

She wears, on meet occasion,

Modes of a bygone day,

Yet moves with bright composure

In fashion’s pageant set,

Until her world she teaches

Its costume to forget.

With score of friends foregathered

Before a cheerful blaze,

She loves good ranging converse

Of past and future days.

Her best delight (too seldom)

From olden friends to hear

How fares the small old city

She left this many a year.

(There is a still more pleasant,

A cosier converse still,

When, all the guests departed,

Close comrades talk their fill.

Beside our smouldering fire

We muse and wonder late;

Commingling household gossip

With talk of gods and fate.)

All seemly ways of living,—

Proportion, comeliness,

Authority and order,—

Her loyal heart possess.

Then with what happy fingers

She spreads the linen fair

In that great Church of Bishops

That is her darling care!

And yet I dare to forecast

What her new name must be

Writ in the mystic volume

Beside the crystal sea:—

Instead of “True Believer,”

The golden quill hath penned,

“Of the poor beasts that perish,

The brave and gentle friend.”

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