All day!
Come over the fields and away!
Come over! Come over!"
SUCCESS
How some succeed who have least need,
In that they make no effort for!
And pluck, where others pluck a weed,
The burning blossom of a star,
Grown from no earthly seed.
For some shall reap that never sow;
And some shall toil and not attain, —
What boots it in ourselves to know
Such labor here is not in vain,
When we still see it so!
SONG
Unto the portal of the House of Song,
Symbols of wrong and emblems of unrest,
And mottoes of despair and envious jest,
And stony masks of scorn and hate belong.
Who enters here shall feel his soul denied
All welcome: lo! the chiselled form of Love,
That stares in marble on the shrine above
The tomb of Beauty, where he dreamed and died!
Who enters here shall know no poppyflowers
Of Rest, or harp-tones of serene Content;
Only sad ghosts of music and of scent
Shall mock the mind with their remembered powers.
Here must he wait till striving patience carves
His name upon the century-storied floor;
His heart's blood staining one dim pane the more
In Fame's high casement while he sings and starves.
THE OLD SPRING
Under rocks whereon the rose,
Like a strip of morning, glows;
Where the azure-throated newt
Drowses on the twisted root;
And the brown bees, humming homeward,
Stop to suck the honey-dew;
Fern and leaf-hid, gleaming gloamward,
Drips the wildwood spring I knew,
Drips the spring my boyhood knew.
Myrrh and music everywhere
Haunt its cascades; – like the hair
That a naiad tosses cool,
Swimming strangely beautiful,
With white fragrance for her bosom,
For her mouth a breath of song; —
Under leaf and branch and blossom
Flows the woodland spring along,
Sparkling, singing, flows along.
Still the wet wan morns may touch
Its gray rocks, perhaps; and such
Slender stars as dusk may have
Pierce the rose that roofs its wave;
Still the thrush may call at noontide,
And the whippoorwill at night;
Nevermore, by sun or moontide,
Shall I see it gliding white,
Falling, flowing, wild and white.
HILLS OF THE WEST
Hills of the west, that gird
Forest and farm,
Home of the nestling bird,
Housing from harm,
When on your tops is heard
Storm:
Hills of the west, that bar
Belts of the gloam,
Under the twilight star,
Where the mists roam,
Take ye the wanderer
Home.
Hills of the west, that dream
Under the moon,
Making of wind and stream,
Late-heard and soon,
Parts of your lives that seem
Tune.
Hills of the west, that take
Slumber to ye,
Be it for sorrow's sake
Or memory,
Part of such slumber make
Me.
FLOWERS
Oh, why for us the blighted bloom!
The blossom that lies withering!
The Master of Life's changeless loom
Hath wrought for us no changeless thing.
Where grows the rose of fadeless Grace?
Wherethrough the Spirit manifests
The fact of an immortal race,
The dream on which religion rests.
Where buds the lily of our Faith?
That grows for us in unknown wise,
Out of the barren dust of death,
The pregnant bloom of Paradise.
In Heaven! so near that flowers know!
That flowers see how near! – and thus
Reflect the knowledge here below
Of love and life unknown to us.
SECOND SIGHT
They lean their faces to me through
Green windows of the woods;
Their white throats sweet with honey-dew
Beneath low leafy hoods —
No dream they dream but hath been true
Here in the solitudes.
Star trillium, in the underbrush,
In whom Spring bares her face;
Sun eglantine, that breathes the blush
Of Summer's quiet grace;
Moon mallow, in whom lives the hush
Of Autumn's tragic pace.
For one hath heard the dryad's sighs
Behind the covering bark;
And one hath felt the satyr's eyes
Gleam in the bosky dark;
And one hath seen the naiad rise
In waters all a-spark.
I bend my soul unto them, stilled
In worship man hath lost;
The old-world myths that science killed
Are living things almost
To me through these whose forms are filled
With Beauty's pagan ghost.
And through new eyes I seem to