A pageant of poets and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Now ends our second age of sovereign song;
The final voice is hushed, the concord dies.
The latest lingerer of the vanished throng
Fades in unanswering skies,
Yet is not lost for long.
New, bird-like notes are fluting in the woods;
Strange tribes of carolling echoes trill
Round the rough slopes of glade and hill;
The winds entrap more subtle harmonies,
And in the strenuous throats of caves and floods
A wild, ecstatic music swells and cries.
In the deep night of Time, its count full-told,
A radiant galaxy of stars afire
Burns through the blackness, scintillant with gold,
Shaped in the likeness of the Song-god's lyre.

2

Deep in a fastness of the Sussex Downs,
Embowered in moss-grown oaks and laurelled ways,
Far from the dusty roads and smoke of towns,
A greensward hides within a woodland maze.
Therein a stone, grey-lichened altar stands
From immemorial days,
Whence sprang of old a sacrificial flame
Fed by a bronze-haired Sibyl's hands
In years of long forgotten fame.
Its carven shaft is girt by laurel bands
Twined by some hidden folk ye may not tell

Save from the goat-foot tracks that dint the sands
About yon bubbling well,
And to the apprehending mind declare
That still the Fauns, if not the Gods, are there.

3

Avow, ye Fauns, to whom our fathers reared
This altar in the glade!
To Pan, the Earth-god with the goatish beard,
Protector of their flocks and kine,
Or ruddy Bacchus for his gift of wine,
Or Dian, the disdainful, moon-cold Maid?—
Nay, to the God of sunshine, dawn, and song—
The young Apollo, beating back the Night,—
These laurel wreaths belong—
The thin flame kindled with his arrows' flight.
Oft round the vapours of the Tripod reeled
A Pythoness, raving of future ills;
And twice or thrice the cowering Fauns, concealed,
Saw in a blinding flash the God revealed
With lyre and loose-strung bow,
And all night long about the entrancéd hills
Heard the magnetic gusts of music blow.

4

Lured onward through the flush of April lanes
And paths by lamps of daffodils defined,
I came when the clear light of evening wanes,
Following faint murmurs born of string and reed,
Through tangled growths inextricably twined,
On that enchanted mead.

How still and void it seemed—no twig that stirred,
Rustle of leaf or sudden flitter of wings,
Movement or sound o'erheard,
Yet on me stole a sense of watching Things,—
Keen sentinels that stood
Alert within the wood
And cast swift webs in all its openings.
Then a thin mist of silver, luminous smoke
Forth from the altar broke
And snared me with its creeping somnolence,
Till at its base I swooned, yet dreamed or knew
That uncouth forest-creatures bore me thence
Within a pale of frondage screened from view.

5

Next surged anear the erst receding tune
With flutes and hautboys swelling, till the strain
Upborne with reedy voices, rent the noon
Of a new day with passionate refrain.
Then swooped a blinding radiance from the sky
Till the God gleamed apparent and drew nigh,
And his winged feet alighting starred the sward
With hyacinthine blooms that hailed their lord.
Around the laurelled margent of the glade,
Upholding new-peeled wands, with filleted brows,
The singing bands of boys and virgins ranged
In rainbow-coloured vesture, counter-changed
Wherever lambent beams of godhood strayed.
Thrust deep into the tangle of the wood,
A path of Triumph under feathery boughs
Ran down from where Apollo stood.
Mounting thereon with eyes serene and clear,
Eyes that outdared the sun and pierced the shade,
The lords of song drew near
To greet the lord of singers, unafraid.