What gifts have you brought in both hands to fling before me in the dust?

I fear, if I accept, to create a debt that can never be paid even by the
loss of all I have.

Do not stand before my window with your youth and flowers to shame my
destitute life.



9


If I were living in the royal town of Ujjain, when Kalidas was the king's
poet, I should know some Malwa girl and fill my thoughts with the music of
her name. She would glance at me through the slanting shadow of her
eyelids, and allow her veil to catch in the jasmine as an excuse for
lingering near me.

This very thing happened in some past whose track is lost under time's dead
leaves.

The scholars fight to-day about dates that play hide-and-seek.

I do not break my heart dreaming over flown and vanished ages: but alas and
alas again, that those Malwa girls have followed them!

To what heaven, I wonder, have they carried in their flower-baskets those
days that tingled to the lyrics of the king's poet?