Two Homes

To a young English lady in the Hospital of the Wounded at Carlsruhe.
Sept. 1870.

WHAT does the dim gaze of the dying find
To waken dream or memory, seeing you?
In your sweet eyes what other eyes are blue,
And in your hair what gold hair on the wind
Floats of the days gone almost out of mind?
In deep green valleys of the Fatherland
He may remember girls with locks like thine;
May dream how, where the waiting angels stand,
Some lost love’s eyes are dim before they shine
With welcome:—so past homes, or homes to be,
He sees a moment, ere, a moment blind,
He crosses Death’s inhospitable sea,
And with brief passage of those barren lands
Comes to the home that is not made with hands.