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| I KNOW a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder, | |
| Than any story painted in your books. | |
| You are so glad? It will not make you gladder; | |
| Yet listen, with your pretty restless looks. | |
| |
| “Is it a Fairy Story?” Well, half fairy— | 5 |
| At least it dates far back as fairies do, | |
| And seems to me as beautiful and airy; | |
| Yet half, perhaps the fairy half, is true. | |
| |
| You had a baby sister and a brother, | |
| (Two very dainty people, rosily white, | 10 |
| Each sweeter than all things except the other!) | |
| Older yet younger—gone from human sight! | |
| |
| And I, who loved them, and shall love them ever, | |
| And think with yearning tears how each light hand | |
| Crept toward bright bloom or berries—I shall never | 15 |
| Know how I lost them. Do you understand? | |
| |
| Poor slightly golden heads! I think I missed them | |
| First, in some dreamy, piteous, doubtful way; | |
| But when and where with lingering lips I kissed them, | |
| My gradual parting, I can never say. | 20 |
| |
| Sometimes I fancy that they may have perished | |
| In shadowy quiet of wet rocks and moss, | |
| Near paths whose very pebbles I have cherished, | |
| For their small sakes, since my most lovely loss. | |
| |
| I fancy, too, that they were softly covered | 25 |
| By robins, out of apple-flowers they knew, | |
| Whose nursing wings in far home sunshine hovered, | |
| Before the timid world had dropped the dew. | |
| |
| Their names were—what yours are! At this you wonder. | |
| Their pictures are—your own, as you have seen; | 30 |
| And my bird-buried darlings, hidden under | |
| Lost leaves—why, it is your dead selves I mean! | |
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