Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

George Willis Cooke, comp. The Poets of Transcendentalism: An Anthology. 1903.

Love Reflected in Nature

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

OUR love is not a fading earthly flower;

Its wingèd seed dropped down from Paradise,

And nursed by day and night, by sun and shower,

Doth momently to fresher beauty rise;

To us the leafless autumn is not bare,

Nor winter’s rattling boughs lack lusty green,

Our summer hearts make summer’s fulness where

No leaf or bud or blossom may be seen:

For nature’s life in lover’s deep life doth lie,

Love—whose forgetfulness is beauty’s death,

Whose mystic key these cells of thou and I

Into the infinite freedom openeth,

And makes the body’s dark and narrow grate

The wide-flung leaves of heaven’s palace-gate.