Four songs

The yellow years have gathered fast
O'er this house upon the hill
Old lilac bushes gaunt and gray
Crowd 'round the sunken sill
And lo! with each returning Spring
Keep tryst at this lonely place
But love and constancy withal
Old Time can ne'er efface.

Thou art mine
I am thine
That is clear as sunshine
Thou art locked tight
Within my heart
Lost is the little key
Never more to part.

Here, there is peace, cool peace
Upon these heights, beneath these trees
Almost the peace of sleep or death
To wearying brain, to lab'ring breath
Here there is peace at last
A sweet forgetting of the past
There is no future here, nor aught
Save this soft healing pause of thought.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.