University of Virginia Library

I. SIGNS AND SEASONS.

THE MONTHS.

TWO DAYBREAKS.

IN THE HALLERTHAL.

(LUXEMBOURG)

THE water wandered singing by my feet,
As through the dells, with many a red-boled beech
O'erarched, I went, that from the fiery reach
The wood-ways warded of the noontide heat.
Through thronging ferns the silver stream did fleet,
Past range on range of temples, each on each
Ensuing still, without the tongue of speech
That told the story of a time effete.
Ah me, thou tiny, trotting, trickling thread,
Mid age-bleached rock and maze of living green
Thy little life that livest, never dead,
How many a generation hast thou seen!
How many an age hath come and gone, whilst thou
Thy careless ditty chantedst then as now!

PROPHETS OF THE PRIME.

NATURE'S SECRET.

I went in woodlands when the leaves were sere:
The watchet skies of Autumn, clear and cold,
Peeped through their panoplies of red and gold;
The wind went dirging to the dying year.
Yet in the wan waste ways a subtle cheer
There breathed; and as I sought to take and hold
The spell of peace that hallowed wood and wold,
“Content!” the robin carolled in mine ear.
Yea, all that is on earth's alike content
To die and in its like to live again,
Save man, that, after seventy years of pain
And strife, clings yet to personality
And wearies heaven with his vain lament
That others in his likeness live, not he.

IN WINTER.

Methinks, in the dead season of the year,
The very nakedness of Nature brings
A keener sight into the soul of things,
The heart to Nature's heart become more near,
When 'gainst the sky the boughs are black and sere:
And to the eye, with leaves and blossomings,
With sky and sun undazed and flash of wings,
The general scheme of all seems grown more clear.
Nay, this I know; the spirit of delight
Far franklier stirs my heart to songful cheer
And my soul flowers in the Winter's night
More freely than when Spring by mead and mere
Leads her bright train or Summer to the height
Runs up the gamut of the flowering year.

FALSE FEBRUARY.

NOT seldom, whilst the Winter yet is king,
Whilst yet the meads are mute and boughs are bare,
A stirring in the February air
There comes, as with a faint foreshadowing,
A passing prophecy of far-off Spring
And distant days, when all the world shall wear
The lovely liveries of Summer fair,
That sets our wintry thought upon the wing.
Well though we know the thing's a Winter's trick,
To hold the soul with expectation sick,
And he will soon resume his iron reign,
Yet our fond hearts alone with hope in vain
Swell not; for hark, the swallows in the eaves
Rejoice as though the world were lush with leaves.

PRIMULA VERIS.

THE HILLS WHENCE MY HELP COMETH.

MY thought still harbours where the silence fills
The far majestic mountains, as they reign,
Kings crowned with silver, o'er the subject plain.
Whether, rose-vestured, in the morning's sills
They stand or, with the sunset's flaming rills
Imperial purple clad, they glow or stain
With blue the distances of noon inane,
My heart is with the everlasting hills.
There, on those summits where the Immortals dwell,
With clouds and fires and thunders fenced about
'Gainst the profane, as he of Israël
That was the song-voice saith, still hope for me
Of help abideth and I look thereout
To have deliverance in days to be.

THE FIRST OF THE ALPS.

THE train fled, hurtling, through the summer-night,
Across the still flat plains of slumbering France,
And I, I waited, in a waking trance,
For that which was to come with coming light:
And with the first faint streaks of morning-white,
The plains began, meseemed, to heave and dance
On either hand; it was the first advance
Of the hill-host that soared upon my sight.
Then, as the day drew on and light waxed wide,
The hills to mountains swelled on every side
And in the distance, like a giant ghost
Of the world's morning, 'gainst the sapphire sky,
The first fore-runner of the Titan host
Of the snow-summits hove and towered high.

SPRING-SADNESS.

THE middle-sweet of Spring is come
And everywhere the thorn is gray:
The world has put its woes away,
Forgot its Winter's martyrdom:
The cuckoo, in the noon-tide hum,
Answers the throstle on the spray.
My heart is heedless of the May;
The throstle in my throat is dumb.
What ails thee, heart? But yesternight
It seems, when all the world was white,
The seeds of song in thee did spring
And ripened up to flower and fruit;
And now, when all with blossoming
And pipe of birds is glad, thou'rt mute!

THE LARK.

“THE sun is up and up with it am I!”
Thus, in a rain of golden melody,
From th'empyréan wafted 'twas to me,
And in the topmost blue I might espy
The lark upmounting higher and more high,
As, with his pinions spurning land and sea,
Still singing, winging, sun-ward travelled he,
As if new heavens he sought beyond the sky.
Voice of the world's aspiring, as our soul
Thou art, that with no earthly heaven or sun
Contented is, but for its wish unwon
Upstraineth still beyond the topmost pole,
To where all wishes solved, all wills made one
Are in the effulgence of the Undifferenced Whole.

VER SALUTIFERUM.

THE throstles wakened me at morning-red
With such a wild melodious choral shout
Of songful jubilance, I might not doubt
But Spring at last was come and Winter sped.
And of a truth it was as they had said;
For all the world with radiance new about
Was raimented and in me, as without,
Delight there stirred that long had lain for dead.
For who was ever yet might still be sad,
When all the world for Winter gone is glad
And who, when all things bud and bloom and sing,
But in the rathe sweet season had relief
Of pain and offered up his Winter's grief
Upon the flower-bound altars of the Spring?

ROSA BENEDICTA.

WAS ever wonder rarer than the rose,
That, with its gala-robes of green and red,
In the mid-prime uprears its regal head,
Hailing us glory in the winter's woes
Bygone and summer come in garden-close
And meadow wide? With breath of balsam shed,
It mindeth us that beauty is not dead
And Love for lovers lives, if but for those.
Small marvel if with us brief space it bide,
If, of its heaven's eternal blossom-tide
Remembering it, beneath our grey sky-dome,
In this our world of winter and lament,
It weary after its celestial home
And pine and pass for very languishment!

THE DEATH OF THE WOOD-WARBLER.

I read to-day how one, who loved birds well,
Lit erst upon a little wild wood-wren,
That, old and solitary, in a glen
Among the trees beside a spring did dwell;
How friendship betwixt man and bird befell,
Till it, at last, its fear forgot of men,
Slept on his hand, contented, and how then
He found it later dead beside the well.
Ah, what a homily to humankind
This preacheth, that had been joy's very spright
And old and lonely grown, no whit repined
For pleasant life fordone and day fall'n night,
But, poet-like, 'spite age and solitude,
Piped on till death, in cheer and courage good!

LILIES.

THIS middle summer morn, an angel band,
Meseems, is lighted down upon the sward;
In robes of light arrayed, with torch and sword,
The airs of heaven they breathe on every hand.
It is the lilies, in the grass that stand
And o'er the July-prime keep watch and ward,
Telling, with bells of frozen snow, fire-cored,
Sweet Summer's triumph to the laughing land.
Who would not, lilies, deem your lovely light
O'er sweet to pass and like the prime, too fair
For Death's unlovesome manage that you were?
Yet must you die and day give place to night;
For all that is must have its wax and wane
And all that's fair must fade, to flower again.

FEATHERED INGRATES.

IN the March-morning all the world was bright:
The thrushes and the blackbirds on the lawn
Were busy ere the dark was wholly gone.
There was their table spread from overnight
With crumbs and all a songbird's appetite
Might tempt: but thicker, there, than mushroom-spawn,
Alack! were crocuses, as flush of dawn
Purple and golden, lilac, blue and white.
What ailed you, feathered rogues, to make your prey
Of these frail firstlings of the flowered year
And mar their vernal pomp, in mischief pure,
Churl-fashion? Manlike, more than bird-like, sure,
'Twas thus my hospitality to pay
My lawn by spoiling of its Springtide cheer.

CONVALLARIA MAJALIS.

I am the Lily of the Valley.
Where in the woods the silence dwells,
My tiny spire of silver bells
I rear in every verdant alley,
That, to the dance when elves did sally
Anights, with chimings filled the dells:
But, now, within its silver cells
The music's mute, past power to rally.
Yet in my soul the song-pulse tarries
And from its proper port of sound
Debarred, to other senses marries
Itself; and so, where May is found,
The wild-wood breeze in perfume carries
My heart's dumb yearning all around.

A MID-MARCH DAY.

MY heart is heavy on this mid-March day,
When from the mouth of hell the East Wind blows,
With menace of immeasurable woes
Winnowing the air. Though Spring is on the way
And with its promise of the middle May,
In the rathe beds the tulip-flame foreshows
The tale of coming summer and the rose,
The time is sadder than the Winter grey.
Dead season of the snows, is't not enough
That thou shouldst fetter us for half the year
In chains of frost, but with thy counterbuff
Of blood-encurdling blasts our infant Spring
Thou thus must poison and thy phantom drear
'Twixt us intrude and Life's requickening?

AUTUMN.

GONE are the Gods; the time for new is near:
Past is the Summer, past the harvesting:
The meads are mute; the birds have ceased to sing;
Dim is the sun, that yesterday was clear,
And gray the heavens dull-mirrored in the mere.
Yet in the woods the leaves' emblazoning
Outglories all the gladness of the Spring,
Decking the last days of the labouring year.
How comes it, these, of all things new and old,
Alone do glory in their own decay
And garb themselves to die in red and gold,
As if with stress of good and evil chance
Forwearied and content to pass away,
Accounting death to be deliverance?

TWO RIVERS.