To F. B.
I.
This envoy of flowers,
A deputy meet,
Your birthday, my friend,
Is instructed to greet,
And my kindliest wishes
To kindly repeat.—
Interpret aright
In friendship’s white light
What the beautiful flowers
Would say, could they speak.
The sensitive flowers,
All voiceless and weak,—
Their meaning, involved
In their bloom and their breath,
Despairing to utter,
They haste to their death.
II.
The sweet-scented flowers
Must droop and decay,
But not what their delicate
Pantings would say.
The messenger fails,
But the message survives—
An essence, a spirit,
That throbs in the lives
Of atoms too subtile
For kinship with clay.
III.
All kindly emotion,
That passes the portal
Of a heart that is truthful,
Is thenceforth immortal:
In its mute transmigration
From age unto age,
In the love of the maid
In the thought of the sage,
It blossoms afresh,
It persists without end,
Joins lover to lover,
Binds friend unto friend.
Then, seeing that flowers
And words are but weak,
Take care that to-night,
You interpret aright
What the sensitive flowers
Would say could they speak.