University of Virginia Library

Ere the first red-orange glimmer
Touched the dial on the lawn,
In the earliest shade, and shimmer
Of the dawn:
When the dark was growing dimmer,
And the moon, 'mid wavy clouds
Struggling for the horizon-land,
Had vanished like a worn-out swimmer:—
Feeding on the misty shrouds,
Nature's grief to grief suborning,
Stood a man alone in sorrow
On a lifted ledge of pines;
Over mounted woods, and sand,
Valley, and rolling mountain-lines,
Watching for the morrow;—

Watching for the daylight,
In the weeping twilight,
In the anguish of the morning.

When first I paused upon these barren bluffs,
Of westland Massachusetts, and looked off
From mountain-roofs thatched by the dropping pine
With his loose leaf,—a natural water-shed;—
Upon the hamlet twinkling through the growth,
The river-silver scattered in the grass,
And all the Tyrian hills! there seemed to me
No spot so fair in all the fair Estate.
And He believed it too; for when the hours
Had, field by field, unlinked the folded vale,
And led me softly by the mountain paths,
And up the hollow rivers; teaching still
New names and natures in their thoughtful round;
And I had followed all the groves that go
From Shaking-Acres, to the Neighbour's Hole!
Still, with each deep-blue gap, or piece of pines,
Or upland farm-field lovely and apart,
I found him there, the Stranger. Vague and dim
The wind stirs through those mountain-terraces
In the burning day; and such his motion seemed:
Yet, like the ailing wind, went everywhere
With a faint, fluttering step; and, when he stood,
He stood as one about to fall, as now
Sick Autumn stands, with weak-blue vapour crowned,
A man who seemed to have walked through life alone:
Feeble he was, and something stepped in years,
Yet sought no succour save of sun and shade;
But ever went apart, and held his face
Deep in the shadow. But most he loved to lie
By poplar-shafts, or where yon maple-stock
Bears on his fork a ball of umbrage up,
And waits for Autumn's wain: in the deep day,
At morning's edge, or night, his place was there.

Skirting the valley, north by needle runs
A sappling coppice, scrags and second-growth,
With sucker-brush and seedlings intermixed,
And a wood-path thrids through from end to end:
There breathes the scented pyrola, and there
The perfect fragrance of the partridge-flower,
'Mid moss, and maiden-hair, and damp, dead leaves;—
A poet's cloister for a hidden hour.
And there I found him murmuring to himself
Like a low brook, but could not come to drink
His words; for still the bond that should have drawn
Held us apart,—that love of lonely Nature,
And quick impatience of human neighbourhood.
And I believed he was some natural poet,
With a great sorrow hard against his heart,
And shunned to tread too close; yet while I gazed
On the sad, patient brow, and the fixed lip
Where silence brooded, I longed to look within
On the completed story of his life;
So easy still it seemed to lift the hand,
And open it, as I would a disused door
Locked with a dusty web. But he passed out;
And if he had a grief, it went with him,
And all the treasure of his untold love;—
A love that carried him forward with the cloud,
Drew him with river-currents, and at night
Impelled him to the mountain's edge and fall
Among the crowding woods and cataracts.

The Summer parted; but ere Autumn's cold
Bade the fall-cricket cease his mournful hymn,
By steps and rests of rock, I once again,
Half-seeking him I shunned, one still fair day
And in the sunshine of the afternoon,
Climbed upward to the overlooking ledge
And stood in thought beneath the dropping pine,
There shook the shining River, and there glimpsed
The village sunk in foliage at my feet,
And one vast pine leaned outward to the gulf.
On a great root that held the tree to the hill
I saw him sitting, till the late red light
Fell wearing westward, and still he sat, and looked
Toward the dim remainder of the day;
And in his hand a bunch of blazing leaves,
Torn from the sumach as he passed along:
While round his feet gathered the mountain flower,
Dry asters, hardhack, and the withering fern.
The night came dark between us on the hill,
And nevermore have I beheld his face;
Yet often since, when I have walked with Sorrow,
In solitude, and hopelessness of heart,
Have I recalled that time, and wondered whether
The old man still went weary on the earth,
And if my dreams of his high gift were true:
But I have waited long indeed to hear
These rivers break in song, or, bluely-dark,
Behold these mountains rank in rolling verse,
Or our red forests light the landscape line.
Something I still have learned,—respect of patience,
And that mysterious Will that proves the heart,
Breaking away the blossoms of its joy,
And, for our latest love, restoring grief;
A swifter sympathy for human pain;
And knowledge of myself, grown out of this,
Unguessed before; a humbler, higher belief
In God and Nature; and more surrendered love.
Still clings the pine-root clamped into the crag;
But the dead top is dry, beneath whose boughs
He sat, and watched the West; and, in my walks.
So changed I feel as I approach the place,
So old in heart and step, it almost seems
As if the Wanderer left his life for mine,
When night came dark between us on the hill:
A double interchange, as if indeed
'Twas my old self that disappeared with him,
And he in me still walks the weary earth.
But these are fancies, and so indeed is most
That I have dreamed or uttered in this regard,
Worthless of utterance may be at the best,
Since first the Stranger came among these rocks:
A common man perhaps, with common cares;
Guiltless of grief, or high romantic love
Of natural beauty; a common life at last,
Though strangely set and shrined in circumstance.

Ah! did the brook sob hoarse, the dark tree pine
With all its branches, when first I missed him hence?—
And found him not, whether my erring feet
Followed the waste flowers up the upland side,
Or dipped in grass, or scaled the Poet's Rock,
Or slid beneath the pines in Wells's woods;
Did Nature bid me mourn? or was it but
The restless beating in my own vague mind
That drove me on? I know not this; but he
Had passed away for ever from the hills.
No more for him, 'mid fallen waves of grass,
Mower or harvest-hand shall mop his brows;
And look across the sunshine; nevermore
Gruff village cur, or even the patient yoke
That after them draw the furrow in the field,
Shall seem to watch those footsteps.
Years have gone,
And, but with me, his memory must be dead;
Yet oft I see a Figure in the fields,
And scarce less real than his personal self,
Which ever faded as the foot drew near.
I often see the figure in the fields,
And hear low voices wailing in the wind,
And I have mourned for him and for his grief:
Yet never heard his name, and never knew
Word of his history, or why he came
Into this outskirt of the wilder land:
And know not now, whether among the roofs
He parted fair, or, as the people say,
Went off between two days, and left the woods
And wilds to mourn him, with the sighing stream.