"The Blind Flower-Girl’s Song" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

from his 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii

Buy my flowers—O buy, I pray!

The blind girl comes from afar;

If the earth be as fair as I hear them say,

These flowers her children are!

Do they her beauty keep?

They are fresh from her lap, I know,

For I caught them fast asleepIn her arms an hour ago,

With the air which is her breath—

Her soft and delicate breath—

Over them murmuring low!—

Ye have a world of light,

Where love in the loved rejoices;

But the blind girl's home is the house of night,

And its beings are empty voices.

As one in the realm below

I stand by the stream of woe;

I hear the vain shadows glide,

I feel their soft breath at my side,

And I thirst the loved forms to see;

And I stretch my fond arms around,

And I catch but a shapeless sound,

For the living are ghosts to me.

Come buy—Come buy!—

Hark! how the sweet things sigh

(For they have a voice like ours),

“The breath of the blind girl closes

The leaves of the saddening roses—

We are tender, we sons of light,

We shrink from this child of night;

From the grasp of the blind girl free us;

We yearn for the eyes that see us—

We are for night too gay,

In your eyes we behold the day—

O buy—O buy the flowers!”

Bulwer.