Come, Love, let 's walk into the spring,
Where we may hear the blackbird sing,
The robin-redbreast and the thrush,
The nightingale in thorny bush,
The mavis sweetly carolling,
These to my Love content will bring.

In yonder dale there are fine flowers,
And many pleasant shady bowers,
A purling brook whose silver streams
Are beautified by Phoebus' beams,
Which stealing through the trees for fear,
Because Diana bathes her there.

See where this nymph with all her train
Comes tripping o'er the park amain,
And in this grove here will she stay,

Full ill, I ween, can measured speech reveal
Or thought embody, what true bosoms feel,
For hollow falsehood long has set her sign
On each soft phrase that speaks a love like mine:
The choicest terms are now enfeoff'd to folly,
To vain delight, or wilful melancholy.

Oh! for a virgin speech, a strain untainted
By worldly use, with holy meaning sainted,
Thoughts to conceive, and words devote to tell
The strength divine of love, its secret spell,
Of brother's love, that is within the heart
A spiritual essence, and exists apart

O BEAUTIFUL Stars, when you see me go
Hither and thither, in search of love,
Do you think me faithless, who gleam and glow
Serene and fixed in the blue above?
O Stars, so golden, it is not so.

But there is a garden I dare not see,
There is a place where I fear to go,
Since the charm and glory of life to me
The brown earth covered there, long ago.
O Stars, you saw it, you know, you know.

Hither and thither I wandering go,
With aimless haste and wearying fret;
In a search for pleasure and love? Not so,
Seeking desperately to forget.

Strong as the death it masters, is the hope
That onward looks to immortality:
Let the frame perish, so the soul survive,
Pure, spiritual and loving. I believe
The grave exalts, not separates, the ties
That hold us in affection to our kind.
I will look down from yonder pitying sky,
Watching and waiting those I love on earth,
Anxious in heaven until they too are there.
I will attend your guardian angel's side,
And weep away your faults with holy tears;
Your midnight shall be filled with solemn thought:
And when, at length, death brings you to my love,

I love one, and he loveth me:
Who sayeth this? who deemeth this?
And is this thought a cause of bliss,
Or source of misery?

The loved may die, or he may change:
And if he die thou art bereft;
Or if he alter, nought is left
Save life that seemeth strange.

A weary life, a hopeless life,
Full of all ill and fear-oppressed;
A weary life that looks for rest
Alone after death's strife.

And love's joy hath no quiet even;
It evermore is variable.
Its gladness is like war in Hell,
More than repose in Heaven.

‘There springs a rose in Fyvie's yard,
And O but it springs bonny!
There 's a daisy in the middle of it,
Its name is Andrew Lammie.

‘I wish the rose were in my breast,
For the love I bear the daisy;
So blyth and merry as I would be,
And kiss my Andrew Lammie.

‘The first time I and my love met
Was in the wood of Fyvie;
He kissëd and he dawted me,
Calld me his bonny Annie.

‘Wi apples sweet he did me treat,
Which stole my heart so canny,
And ay sinsyne himself was kind,
My bonny Andrew Lammie.’

These fresh beauties (we can prove)
Once were Virgins sick of love,
Turn'd to Flowers. Still in some
Colours goe, and colours come.

I NEVER shall henceforth approve
The deity of Love
Since he could be
So far unjust as to wound me,
And leave my mistress free.
As if my flame could leave a print
Upon a heart of flint.
Can flesh and stone
Be e'er converted into one,
By my poor flame alone?
Were he a god, he'd neither be
Partial to her, nor me,
But by a dart
Directed into either's heart
Make both so feel the smart,
That being heated with his subtile fire,
Our loves might make us feel but one desire.

My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love's refinèd gold,
May love's gold coin be current with us still.

May love be sweeter for the vanished days,
And your most perfect beauty still as dear
As when your troubled singer stood at gaze
In the dear March of a most sacred year.

May what we are be all we might have been,
And that potential, perfect, O my friend,
And may there still be many sheafs to glean
In our love's acre, comrade, till the end.

Because I feel that I cannot forget,
I think thee, Lord!—Because for ever now
My eyes will meet the sinless eyes I met,
And see the dark hair shade a sinless brow:

Because, though she is dead,—aye, dead in shame,
Polluted through the villany of one
Who, lusting, did in love's dishonoured name
The meanest deed that ever on earth was done;

Because, though she be lost, she for whose sake
I would have gone with singing to my tomb,
I think of her … as even the ice-bound lake
Dreams of green banks divine with summer's bloom: