A Fruit Piece

The afternoon of summer folds     Its warm arms round the marigolds,     And with its gleaming fingers, pets     The watered pinks and violets     That from the casement vases spill,     Over the cottage window-sill,     Their fragrance down the garden walks     Where droop the dry-mouthed hollyhocks.     How vividly the sunshine scrawls     The grape-vine shadows on the walls!     How like a truant swings the breeze     In high boughs of the apple-trees!     The slender "free-stone" lifts aloof,     Full languidly above the roof,     A hoard of fruitage, stamped with gold     And precious mintings manifold.     High up, through curled green leaves, a pear     Hangs hot with ripeness here and there.     Beneath the sagging trellisings,     In lush, lack-lustre clusterings,     Great torpid grapes, all fattened through     With moon and sunshine, shade and dew,     Until their swollen girths express     But forms of limp deliciousness -     Drugged to an indolence divine     With heaven's own sacramental wine.