Echo

How sweet the answer Echo makes
To music at night,
When, roused by lute or horn, she wakes,
And far away, o’er lawns and lakes,
Goes answering light.

Yet Love hath echoes truer far,
And far more sweet,
Than e’er beneath the moonlight’s star,
Of horn or lute, or soft guitar,
The songs repeat.

‘Tis when the sigh, in youth sincere,
And only then —
The sigh that’s breathed for one to hear,
Is by that one, that only dear,
Breathed back again!