The Poem

LYRICAL AND DRAMATIC. 117 for an hour to put the keystone to his palace that he built of running brooks and trees and buds and the sound of the sea, and all the lights of heaven to window it. [Esmés eyes open.] Esmé! you must wake up and kiss father! ESME [half awake}. He sang to me all night, not his voice only, but a deeper voice that I understood so well as I never understood, a voice like his poem, only more beautiful even than that, and I can’t remember one word, only that he kissed me all the night; and there was as it were a vapour, an incense- cloud, about me, and I could not see—and I am so happy. VAUGHAN. Esmé, I am here, your father. ESME, Ah! it comes back. He is dead. Oh, God! Oh, God! And we were to have been married a month to-day. . VAUGHAN. And he left the poem and could not finish it. ESME [ pointing to scattered papers on a table}, What have you been doing with those papers, father ?