East and west : the discovery of America and other poems

Let us give thanks for friendly solitudes
Of dark primeval woods,
Where jaded kings of men
As at a shrine may charge themselves again
With rays magnetic
Of fire prophetic,
Currents of inspiration
That circulate through God's unspoiled creation.

'T is well the human soul
Is nature's final goal;
That worlds dissolve in time's relentless void,
And suns should be destroyed
To yield one drop of penitential bliss,
Or the sweet perfume of Christ's pardoning kiss.

Yet flesh-spun bodies
Dim not the sphere where God is.
Nor are these care-worn streets the places
Where fall the gentlest dews of spiritual graces.
The fevered pulse of over-nourished wealth
Bodes not of health.
Nor is it Christian life
To glory in the elemental strife,

Inherited from birth,
'Twixt man and earth.
Or why
Boast of our eagerness to multiply
These sense-distracted strings,
That sound no newborn note of hopeful things,
But as in dreams
Babble the self-same themes?
O pity! that our toil
Sunk in this precious acreage of soil
Should feed, ere harvest day begins,
The wasting conflagration of our sins!
Better the unripe times
Of pregnant Tertiary climes
Where the slow-ebbing waters lay
Upon rich mines of vegetable clay!

Is there no flaw
In title of a self-consuming law?
Play we the tyrant less
In thin disguise of democratic dress?
Who gave the right
To disinherit man for revels of a night?
And am I free to desecrate my home,
As Nero burned his Rome?

God made the mountains lone
Crowned with the nimbus of a cooler zone
For evening worship of the weary plain;

And tilted up their sides
To give the impulse to His founts of rain;
And clothed them with His robe of living green,
And folded them in gauze of misty sheen,
As lovers deck their brides:
Full-orbed, and mellow in their juicy youth;
Not swept by sudden flood
Of hot intemperate blood,
Nor wan with limp distress
And quick exhausted by their bald excess;
But fresh and moist like ever vernal truth:
Yielding a sympathetic tear
For every crisis of the tragic year,
Saving earth's tidal flow
For daily bounty to the fields below,
Or spreading kindly wing of storm superb
To shield each parching herb,
Even as planes of unseen spirit brood
O'er thirsty deserts of our human mood.

Caught in their net of roots, as in a cloud,
The small drops slip
With many a sob and drip
Down the draped bosoms of the granite-browed;
Till with shy looks
Of fairies gliding from a hundred nooks
They leap together
In swift cool plashing of the hidden brooks.
Now bolder-hearted,

Skipping from dewy fringes of the heather,
As tears of joy escape in clearing weather
The soft lids parted,
Or children who should roam
Unconscious of their long deserted home,
So hand in hand,
A happy laughing band,
They dance upon the gardens of the land.

So shall the gladsome music of their bliss
Breathe life upon man's wearied industries.
No laggards they,
Or careless drones upon a wanton way,
But ever helpful in their lightest play.
Whether in moments still
Of dreamy mood on heaven-reflecting lawn,
Or racing like a startled fawn
At whistle of the mill,
Or in the frenzy of their maddest reels
Churning the curds of froth from circling wheels,
Or far, far down
Lightening with laughter of their lips
The stately march of heavy-laden ships
Toward the town;—
Gladly they water every hopeful soil
Of honest human toil,
Till blended with the elemental seas
God grants them well-earned peace.

So let us thank Him for these hills of pine,
The voice divine
That echoes in His plan
For self-bound man;
And from His purer ways
In nature's sweet unbroken peace
May we behold the law of our release
In life of thankful use and reverential praise.

University of Virginia Library

GOD'S FORESTS.