HE IS TALL and lean, withered to the bone with long repeated fever, like a dead tree unable to draw a single drop of sap from anywhere. In despairing patience, his mother carries him like a child into the sun, where he sits by the roadside in the shortening shadows of each forenoon. The world passes by-a woman to fetch water, a herd-boy with cattle to pasture, a laden cart to the distant market-and the mother hopes that some least stir of life may touch the awful torpor of her dying son.
THE MORNING-light aches with the pain of parting. Poet, take up thy flute! Let be, if thou must depart, and go, leaving thy song to the flowers in this dew-dripping autumn. Such a morning will come again at the gold-tinted border of the East with kunda flowers in her locks. In the shady garden path, plaintive with dove's cooing, tender with the caressing enchantment of the green, will rise again the vision of this light, her steps tinkling with the anklet of thine own songs. Let be, if thou must depart.
