Legends of the Morrow :: :: University of Virginia Library

Legends of the Morrow

By Thomas Gordon Hake

Hake, Thomas Gordon (1809-1895)

THE ANGEL OF NATURE.

THE POET'S ALMS-HOUSE.

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THE ANGEL OF NATURE.

I

The year has reached that longest day
Which holds all space in summer's calm;
No leaf upon the laden spray
But shows to heaven its grateful palm;
No bloom upon the wayside bower
But bears the fulness of its flower.

II

Summers as calm have been before;
Myriads of times have come and gone:
What are they now but human lore?
This one is ours, our only one!
Be there a leaf no longer green,
'Tis from the days of what has been.

III

While comes up sunshine from the South
In its still path a Maiden walks,
Not voiceless with that budding mouth
Which to itself for Nature talks,—
Dumb souls unseen within her sing
Who with the air is murmuring.

IV

Upon her face so bathed in light
A love-joy and a sorrow twine:
How these in sweet accord unite
The girl herself doth not divine,
Nor why her eyes, so deeply sad,
Seem to the happy ever glad.

V

With songs that fire and fashion them,
Those eyes, oft perilous and pale,
Can flash, and like the opal-gem
Their many lights in one exhale.
The messenger of joy and sorrow,
She sings the Legends of the Morrow.

VI

Now mourns she with dishevelled hair
Where the mute cypress waves its charm;
Now dances at the village fair
With swaying neck and bended arm:
Unto all hearts is she akin;
She laughs, she grieves, though not within.

VII

On river, sea, and mountain-wood
To where the free horizon turns
She revels, and, in witching mood,
Steps o'er them to the farthest bourns;
Along her wayward path unknown
Whence she hath come or whither gone.

VIII

Where the moon's changing aspects break
Her face looks up, though not to think;
Rays fall on it, as on a lake,
Too buoyant through her soul to sink;
In their clear flood of witchery tossed,
Her dream unfelt; her meaning lost.

IX

No home hath she, all homes are hers:
Her wreathèd gifts she takes in twain;
To one her joy she ministers
To one her ecstasy of pain,
Or maybe drops them twined in one
Until their chequered use is done.

X

Where want has ground the earth to dust
And heart-ache settles on the cheek,
She offers not the needed crust
To feed the hungry and the weak;
Yet with a light of ripening fields
Her smile the thought of plenty yields.

XI

She walks the streets that maidens frail
Have trodden since the nights of old,
But wades not through the miry trail;
Her feet are clean as hidden gold,
They move as o'er the virgin snows:
Yet in her step all passion glows.

XII

The sun writes legends on the seed
As in a book: she stands among
The souls that turn the leaves and read
As she repeats the morrow's song:
But few who hear her legends feel
The dreaded meanings they reveal.

XIII

Some follow her with love-worn eyes,
Like those who look up at a star
That whispers them from unknown skies,
And gaze, adoring from afar;
But she no glance of love returns
Though at the full her passion burns.

XIV

She grieves not where the stony ground
Holds fragments of a fallen power,—
The humbled arch, the gathered mound,
The gateway to the vanished tower:
Though sunset flood with crimson tears
These wrecks of the unburied years.

XV

The lore-lorn from her promise turn,—
Their hope is not the morrow's calm:
Her thoughts perturb the broken urn
And seem the bones to disembalm:
She sifts the dust of days gone by;
Troubling the old eternity.

XVI

No art can with her presence vie!
She shudders o'er the mock cartoon:
The dome but not the changing sky;
The tree-like ghosts, the faded moon.
Breathe these, she asks, her dreamy skies
Her world, her earthly paradise?

XVII

She calls up Nature to our view,—
There the moon rises to its height
And fills a soul-reflecting blue
That deepens with the growth of light:
There stars are fire, and meteor-steams
Are channels for the morrow's dreams.

XVIII

True to herself through patient time,
On her none dare their safety stake:
False seems she almost to a crime,
Yet knew she all her heart would break,
And crave for its eternal sleep;
And shed the tears that mortals weep.

XIX

Then would she feel as poets feel
And never turn her love aside:
They know her and they still appeal
To their exalted virgin bride,
Who till the last her love denies
To the long yearning of their eyes.

XX

They join her in the hymn of morn,
And, 'mid the echoes of a past,
With her call on the day unborn
To come without a night at last,
To deepen from earth's shifting shoal,
Into a harbour for the soul.

XXI

From his dark den of alchemy
In vain shall mortal plot to rob
Her secret heart that beats so high,
That sends so far its mighty throb:
Even though it pulsate at his core
And send its living wave before.

XXII

She sings for one who cannot sing
Nor in her swelling chant rejoice;
She knoweth not the nameless thing
That Nature utters through her voice,
Though her song echo to the day
When she, with us, shall pass away.

XXIII

The worlds are trembling in her notes:
Suns, rampant, to her voice submit;
No hand can gather in their votes;
Their doom is in her volume writ;
She who her sacred message brings,
And Legends of the Morrow sings.