The Declaration Poem by Nathaniel Parker Willis

’Twas late, and the gay company was gone,
and the light lay soft on the deserted room
from alabaster vases, and a scent
of orange leaves, and sweet verbena came
through the unshutter’d window on the air,
and the rich pictures with their dark old tints
hung like a twilight landscape, and all things
seem’d hush’d into a slumber. Isabel,
the dark-eyed, spiritual Isabel
was leaning on her harp, and I had stay’d
to whisper what I could not when the crowd
hung on her look like worshippers. I knelt,
and with the fervour of a lip unused
to the cool breath of reason, told my love.
There was no answer, and I took the hand
that rested on the strings, and press’d a kiss
upon it unforbidden—and again
besought her, that this silent evidence
that I was not indifferent to her heart,
might have the seal of one sweet syllable.
I kiss’d the small white fingers as I spoke,
and she withdrew them gently, and upraised
her forehead from its resting place, and look’d
earnestly on me—
she had been asleep
!