Love, making these what they are,
For without love they were naught.
Millions of stars; and they roll
Over your path that is white,
Here where we end the long stroll.—
Seen of the innermost sight,
All of the love of my soul
Kisses your spirit. Good-night.
PART II.
1.
She delays, meditating.
Sad skies and a foggy rain
Dripping from streaming eaves;
Over and over again
Dead drop of the trickling leaves;
And the woodward winding lane,
And the hill with its shocks of sheaves,
One scarce perceives.
Must I go in such sad weather
By the lane or over the hill?
Where the splitting milk-weed's feather
Dim, diamond-like rain-drops fill?
Or where, ten stars together,
Buff ox-eyes rank the rill
By the old corn-mill?
The creek by this is swollen,
And its foaming cascades sound;
And the lilies, smeared with pollen,
In the race look dull and drowned;—
'T is the path we oft have stolen
To the bridge, that rambles round
With willows crowned.
Through a bottom wild with berry
Or packed with the iron-weeds,
With their blue combs washed and very
Purple; the sorghum meads
Glint green near a wilding cherry;
Where the high wild-lettuce seeds
The fenced path leads.
A bird in the rain beseeches;
And the balsams' budding balls
Smell drenched by the way which reaches
The wood where the water falls;
Where the warty water-beeches
Hang leaves one blister of galls,
The mill-wheel drawls.
My shawl instead of a bonnet! …
Though the wood be soaking yet
Through the wet to the rock I 'll run it—
How sweet to meet in the wet!—
Our rock with the vine upon it,
Each flower a fiery jet— …
He won't forget!
2.
He speaks, rowing.
Deep are the lilies here that lay
Lush, lambent leaves along our way,
Or pollen-dusty bob and float
White nenuphars about our boat
This side the woodland we have reached;
Two rapid strokes our skiff is beached.
There is no path. Heaped foxgrapes choke
Huge trunks they wrap. This giant oak
Floods from the Alleghanies bore
To wedge here by this sycamore;
Its wounded bulk, heart-rotted white,
Lights ghostly foxfire in the night.
Now oar we through this willow fringe
The bulging shore that bosks—a tinge
Of green mists down the marge;—where old,
Scarred cottonwoods build walls of shade
With breezy balsam pungent; bowled
Around vined trunks the floods have made
Concentric hollows. On we pass.
As we pass, we pass, we pass,
In daisy jungles deep as grass,
A bubbling sparrow flirts above
In wood-words with its woodland love:
A white-streaked woodpecker afar
Knocks: slant the sun dashed, each a star,
Three glittering jays flash over: slim
The piping sand-snipes skip and skim
Before us: and a finch or thrush—
Who may discover where such sing?—
The silence rinses with a gush
Of mellow music gurgling.
On we pass, and onward oar
To yon long lip of ragged shore,
Where from yon rock spouts, babbling frore
A ferny spring; where dodging by
Rests sulphur-disced that butterfly;
Mallows, rank crowded in for room,
'Mid wild bean and wild mustard bloom;
Where fishers 'neath those cottonwoods
Last Spring encamped those ashes say
And charcoal boughs.—'T is long till buds!—
Here who in August misses May?
3.
He speaks, resting.
Here the shores are irised; grasses
Clump the water gray that glasses
Broken wood and deepened distance:
Far the musical persistence
Of a field-lark lingers low
In the west where tulips blow.
White before us flames one pointed
Star; and Day hath Night anointed
King; from out her azure ewer
Pouring starry fire, truer
Than true gold. Star-crowned he stands
With the starlight in his hands.
Will the moon bleach through the ragged
Tree-tops ere we reach yon jagged
Rock, that rises gradually?
Pharos of our homeward valley.
Down the dusk burns golden-red;
Embers are the stars o'erhead.
At my soul some Protean elf is:
You 're Simaetha, I am Delphis;
You are Sappho and her Phaon—
I. We love. There lies a ray on
All the dark Æolian seas
'Round the violet Lesbian leas.
On we drift. He loves you. Nearer