Best Times

WE went a day’s excursion to the stream, Basked by the bank, and bent to the ripple-gleam, And I did not know That life would show, However it might flower, no finer glow.

I walked in the Sunday sunshine by the road That wound towards the wicket of your abode, And I did not think That life would shrink To nothing ere it shed a rosier pink.

Unlooked for I arrived on a rainy night, And you hailed me at the door by the swaying light, And I full forgot That life might not Again be touching that ecstatic height.

And that calm eve when you walked up the stair, After a gaiety prolonged and rare, No thought soever That you might never Walk down again, struck me as I stood there.

Rewritten from an old draft.