Each wonted thing doth grow So altered, that I wander to and fro, Bewildered by the most familiar sight, And feel like one who rouses in the night From dream of ecstasy, and cannot know At first if he be sleeping or awake, My foolish heart so foolish for thy sake Hath grown, dear one! Teach me to be more wise.
I blush for all my foolishness doth lack; I fear to seem a coward in thine eyes.
Teach me, dear one,--but first thou must come back! Another was a little poem, which she laughingly called his and not hers.
One morning, when they had bade each other "good-by," and she had kissed him,--a rare thing for Mercy to do, he had exclaimed, "That kiss will go floating before me all day in the air, Mercy.

I shall see every thing in a light as rosy as your lips." At night she gave him this little poem, saying,-- "This is your poem, not mine, darling.

I should never have thought of any thing so absurd myself." "COULEUR DE ROSE." All things to-day "Couleur de rose," I see,--oh, why?
I know, and my dear love she knows, Why, oh, why! On both my eyes her lips she set, All red and warm and dewy wet, As she passed by.
The kiss did not my eyelids close, But like a rosy vapor goes, Where'er I sit, where'er I lie, Before my every glance, and shows All things to-day "Couleur de rose." Would it last thus?
Alas, who knows?
Men ask and sigh: They say it fades, "Couleur de rose." Why, oh, why?
Without swift joy and sweet surprise, Surely those lips upon my eyes Could never lie, Though both our heads were white as snows, And though the bitterest storm that blows, Of trouble and adversity, Had bent us low: all life still shows To eyes that love "Couleur de rose." This sonnet, also, she persisted in calling Stephen's, and not her own, because he had asked her the question which had suggested it:-- LOVERS' THOUGHTS.
"How feels the earth when, breaking from the night, The sweet and sudden Dawn impatient spills Her rosy colors all along the hills?
How feels the sea, as it turns sudden white, And shines like molten silver in the light Which pours from eastward when the full moon fills Her time to rise ?" "I know not, love, what thrills The earth, the sea, may feel.

How should I know?
Except I guess by this,--the joy I feel When sudden on my silence or my gloom Thy presence bursts and lights the very room?
Then on my face doth not glad color steal Like shining waves, or hill-tops' sunrise glow ?" One of the others was the poem of which I spoke once before, the poem which had been suggested to her by her desolate sense of homelessness on the first night of her arrival in Penfield.

This poem had been widely copied after its first appearance in one of the magazines; and it had been more than once said of it, "Surely no one but a genuine outcast could have written such a poem as this." It was hard for Mercy's friends to associate the words with her.