Rest in the grave! — but rest is for the weary,
⁠And her slight limbs were hardly girt for toil;
Rest is for lives worn out, deserted, dreary,
⁠Which have no brightness left for death to spoil.

We yearn for rest, when power and passion wasted
⁠Have left to memory nothing but regret:
She sleeps, while life's best pleasures, all untasted,
⁠Had scarce approached her rosy lips as yet.

Her childlike eyes still lacked their crowning sweetness,
⁠Her form was ripening to more perfect grace.
She died, with the pathetic incompleteness
⁠Of beauty's promise on her pallid face.

What undeveloped gifts, what powers untested,
⁠Perchance with her have passed away from earth;
What germs of thought in that young brain arrested
⁠May never grow and quicken and have birth!

She knew not love who might have loved so truly,
⁠Though love-dreams stirred her fancy, faint and fleet;
Her soul's ethereal wings were budding newly,
⁠Her woman's heart had scarce begun to beat.

We drank the sweets of life, we drink the bitter,
⁠And death to us would almost seem a boon;
But why, to her, for whom glad life were fitter,
⁠Should darkness come ere day had reached its noon?

No answer, — save the echo of our weeping
⁠Which from the woodland and the moor is heard,
Where, in the springtime, ruthless stormwinds sweeping
⁠Have slain the unborn flower and new-fledged bird.

What is the sweetest little flower
In all the leaf-green wild?
O that must be the violet
The spring's own foster child.
O no, not hers the sweetest dower,
I know a fairer little flower!

What is the sweetest little flower
In all the leaf-green wild ?
Then it must be the red, red rose
On which the sunbeam smiled.
O no, not hers the fairest dower,
I know a fairer little flower.

The rose and violet fade and die
Amid the leaf-green wood
I know a flower that never fades
In silent solitude.
Then name to me this forest child,
The sweetest flower of all the wild.

When gentle spring the violet wakes
And wood-birds sing and brood,
Then waits my wondrous little flower
In patient solitude.
No breath of perfume hour by hour —
Yet still the sweetest little flower.

When all the flowers go to sleep
When leaf and blossom fall,
When shrub and tree all mourning stand
And birds no longer call,
From ice and snow then blooms to light
My little flower so silver white.

Of love within the heart that glows
Undying, ever new,
This flower that from the silence grows
Is semblance fair and true.
Free from its thrall of snow and ice
Dear little blossom — Edelweiss.

In poring o'er her face, which is not fair
To casual eyes as it is fair in mine,
I ponder oft what painter-hand divine
Had surest caught the soul of beauty there;

And for the task, in wayward fancy, dare
Evoke some sturdy truth-teller — Holbein
Or Dürer — or anon some Florentine,
Of grace more delicate and dainty-rare.

But most to thee, great master, most to thee,
O Leonardo, do I turn, whose gaze
Through swirl of change and time's slow-gathering haze
Pierced radiant, and who thus did'st strangely see
The high-soul'd cultured lady of our days.

Master, the face I love, draw it for me!