Explore "The Encounter" by Helen Gray Cone on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There's a wood-way winding high, / Roofed far up with light-green flicker, / Save one midmost star of sky. / Underfoot 'tis all pale brown / With the dead leaves matted down / One on other, thick and thicker; / Soft, but springing to the tread. / There a youth late met a maid / Running lightly, -- oh, so fleetly! / "Whence art thou? " the herd-boy said. / Either side her long hair swayed, / Half a tress and half a braid, / Coloured like the soft dead leaf. / As she answered, laughing sweetly, / On she ran, as flies the swallow; / He could not choose but follow / Though it had been to his grief.
"I have come up from the valley, -- / From the valley! " Once he caught her, / Swerving down a sidelong alley, / For a moment, by the hand. / "Tell me, tell me," he besought her, / "Sweetest, I would understand / Why so cold thy palm, that slips / From me like the shy cold minnow? / The wood is warm, and smells of fern, / And below the meadows burn. / Hard to catch and hard to win, oh! / Why are those brown finger tips / Crinkled as with lines of water?"