Fly care not.
leave the nest.

Child, I am happier in your happiness
Than in mine own.

Miriam.

It is not that!

Father. What else? Miriam. That chamber in the tower. Father. What chamber, child? Your nurse is here? Miriam. My Mother's nurse and mine. She comes to dress me in my bridal veil. Father. What did she say?

Miriam. She said, that you and I Had been abroad for my poor health so long

She fear'd I had forgotten her, and I ask'd

About my Mother, and she said, 'Thy

hair

Birds and brides must

Is golden like thy Mother's, not so fine.' Father. What then? what more?

Miriam. She said perhaps indeed She wander'd, having wander'd now so

far

Beyond the common date of death - that you, When I was smaller than the statuette Of my dear Mother on your bracket here You took me to that chamber in the tower, The topmost

a chest there, by which you knelt And there were books and dresses - left to me,

And one was dark, and both were beau ful.

No voice for either spoke within my be Then, for the surface eye, that only de On outward beauty, glancing from the To the other, knew not that w pleased it most,

The raven ringlet or the gold; but Were dowerless, and myself, I used walk

This

Terrace-morbid,

melanch-l/

mine

And yet not mine the hall, the farm. field;

For all that ample woodland whispe 'debt,'

The brook that feeds this lakelet mur'd' debt,'

And in yon arching avenue of old dr Tho' mine, not mine, I heard the sce rook

And carrion crow cry 'mortgage.'
Miriam.
Father's fa

Visited on the children!
Father.

A kinsman, dying,

Ay, but then summon'd me

Rome

He left me wealth ney'd hence,

and while I jo

And saw the world fly by me like

dream,

And while I communed with my trus self,

I woke to all of truest in myself, Till, in the gleam of those mid-summe dawns,

The form of Muriel faded, and the fact Of Miriam grew upon me, till I knew. And past and future mix'd in Heav and made

The rosy twilight of a perfect day.
Miriam. So glad? no tear for him,
who left you wealth,
Your kinsman?

Father. I had seen the man but once. He loved my name not me; and ther I

pass'd

Home, and thro' Venice, where a jeweller, So far gone down, or so far up in life, That he was nearing his own hundre sold

This ring to me, then laugh'd, 'The ring is weird.'

And she that came to part them all too late,

And found a corpse and silence, drew the ring

From his dead finger, wore it till her death,

Shrined him within the temple of her heart,

Made every moment of her after life
A virgin victim to his memory,
And dying rose, and rear'd her arms, and
cried

"I see him, Io t'amo, Io t'amo."

Miriam. Legend or true? so tender
should be true!

Did he believe it? did you ask him?
Father.

Ay!

But that half skeleton, like a barren

ghost

From out the fleshless world of spirits, laugh'd:

--

now

Was all ablaze with crimson to the roof, And all ablaze too plunging in the lake Head-foremost who were those that stood between

The tower and that rich phantom of the tower?

Muriel and Miriam, each in white, and like May-blossoms in mid autumn -was it they?

A light shot upward on them from the

lake.

What sparkled there? whose hand was that? they stood So close together. I am not keen of sight,

Muriel had the

―――――――

But coming nearer ring