University of Virginia Library

The Springtime blossoms like a bride
And even on London's grimy tide
Some reflex casts of light and love.
The streets below, the skies above,
Each other, wondering, survey
As who “What have we twain,” should say,
“With one another here to do?”
And I Spring's dream of gold and blue,
Life's dull phantasmagoric show
Athwart, ensuing, as I go,
Long for the walls and roofs to pass
And leave the highways to the grass,
For all the weary worldly hum
To cease and let the flowertide come,
To see, instead of stones, once more,
The verdure-vaulted forest-floor.
For the dear days before the crowd,
When in the lanes the thrush was loud,
The days ere love and light and song
Were crowded out from life, I long,
As by the January hearth,
When oversnowed are green and garth
And all without the raging East
Goes rending man and bird and beast,
One sits and waits for Winter done
And wearies for the summer sun.

Borne on the highway's boundless stream,
I wander with my waking dream,
Among an alien crowd, that knows
Nor whence it comes nor where it goes,
Of stranger folk, whose lightless eyes
Bytimes, with wondering surprise,
Not all unblent with pitying scorn,
Of lack of comprehension born,
Upon me rest and who awhile
Regard me with a puzzled smile,
Ne'er doubting, — these whose lives are vain,
— That I am mad and they are sane.
If sanity, indeed, be that
With vanity which rhymes so pat,
But by the sibilant differing,
Which doth the geese to memory bring,
God help the sane, who seem to know
No difference 'twixt joy and woe,
Who cannot sow and cannot reap,
Who know not how to smile or weep,
But, when the lark is in the sky
And blue and bright is Heaven's eye,
Leave lea and hill and shore and down,
To jostle in the joyless town!

And yet, what say I? I, like them,
The labouring tides of London stem
And (why uneath it were to tell),
In this tenth circle stray of Hell,
I, who to fare in field and wood
Was born, a son of solitude,
Whom Nature branded from his birth
To walk the lonely ways of earth
And in the footsteps of the Spring
Ensue forever, wandering,
Still seeking, from his kind afar,
The fellowship of flower and star,
Hearkening fore'er from breeze or bird
To catch the enchanted wonder-word,
That should to his attent appeal
The secret of the world reveal
And bid the portals of the land
Of dreams fly open to his hand.
Yet in the troublous town dwell I,
Against my will, I know not why;
I only know that all are bound
To follow Fate's relentless round
And that the Destinies, which make
Our lives, as little notice take
Or heed of that which I or you
Or any man were fain to do,
As we of oxen question how
They choose to labour at the plough
Or of draught-horses, whether they
Would liefer this or the other way
Their burdens drag along the streets,
In Winter's colds or Summer's heats.
The thralls of blind Necessity,
Even as the cattle are, are we;
And if our chains be steel or gold,
It matters not, when all is told.
No help for us there is, in fine,
But, unresisting, to resign
Ourselves unto the common lot,
Unwearying to alter what
For ineluctable we know,
And on Life's soil, wherefrom there blow
Few blossoms of delight or cheer,
By the pale rays of Thought to rear,
(Sole crop at our arbitrament
That is,) the field-flowers of Content.