Nature

A midnight black with clouds is in the sky;
I seem to feel, upon my limbs, the weight
Of its vast brooding shadow. All in vain
Turns the tired eye in search of form; no star
Pierces the pitchy veil; no ruddy blaze,
From dwellings lighted by the cheerful hearth,
Tinges the flowering summits of the grass.
No sound of life is heard, no village hum,
Nor measured tramp of footstep in the path,
Nor rush of wing, while, on the breast of Earth,
I lie and listen to her mighty voice:
A voice of many tones, sent up from streams
That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen,
Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air,
From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day,
And hollows of the great invisible hills,
And sands that edge the ocean, stretching far
Into the ni...

It is the Harvest Moon!    On gilded vanes
    And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
    And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
    Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
    And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
    Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
    With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
    Of Nature have their image in the mind,
    As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
    Only the empty nests are left behind,
    And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

Behold, those monarch oaks, that rise
With lofty branches to the skies,
Have large proportion'd roots that grow
With equal longitude below:
Two bards that now in fashion reign,
Most aptly this device explain:
If this to clouds and stars will venture,
That creeps as far to reach the centre;
Or, more to show the thing I mean,
Have you not o'er a saw-pit seen
A skill'd mechanic, that has stood
High on a length of prostrate wood,
Who hired a subterraneous friend
To take his iron by the end;
But which excell'd was never found,
The man above or under ground.
    The moral is so plain to hit,
That, had I been the god of wit,
Then, in a saw-pit and wet weather,
Should Young and Philips drudge together.

If seasons, like the human race, had souls,
Then two artistic spirits live within
The Chameleon mind of Autumn - these,
The Poet's mentor and the Painter's guide.
The myriad-thoughted phases of the mind
Are truly represented by the hues
That thrill the forests with prophetic fire.
And what could painter's skill compared to these?
What palette ever held the flaming tints
That on these leafy hieroglyphs foretell
How set the ebbing currents of the year?
What poet's page was ever like to this,
Or told the lesson of life's waning days
More forcibly, with more of natural truth,
Than yon red maples, or these poplars, white
As the pale shroud that wraps some human corse?
And then, again, the spirit of a King,
Clothed with that majesty most monarchs lack,
Mig...

Rain on the face of the sea,
    Rain on the sodden land,
And the window-pane is blurred with rain
    As I watch it, pen in hand.

Mist on the face of the sea,
    Mist on the sodden land,
Filling the vales as daylight fails,
    And blotting the desolate sand.

Voices from out of the mist,
    Calling to one another:
"Hath love an end, thou more than friend,
    Thou dearer than ever brother?"

Voices from out of the mist,
    Calling and passing away;
But I cannot speak, for my voice is weak,
    And ... this is the end of my lay.

The fir trees taper into twigs and wear
The rich blue green of summer all the year,
Softening the roughest tempest almost calm
And offering shelter ever still and warm
To the small path that towels underneath,
Where loudest winds--almost as summer's breath--
Scarce fan the weed that lingers green below
When others out of doors are lost in frost and snow.
And sweet the music trembles on the ear
As the wind suthers through each tiny spear,
Makeshifts for leaves; and yet, so rich they show,
Winter is almost summer where they grow.

I remember, when a child,
How within the April wild
Once I walked with Mystery
In the groves of Arcady....
Through the boughs, before, behind,
Swept the mantle of the wind,
Thunderous and unconfined.

Overhead the curving moon
Pierced the twilight: a cocoon,
Golden, big with unborn wings
Beauty, shaping spiritual things,
Vague, impatient of the night,
Eager for its heavenward flight
Out of darkness into light.

Here and there the oaks assumed
Satyr aspects; shadows gloomed,
Hiding, of a dryad look;
And the naiad-frantic brook,
Crying, fled the solitude,
Filled with terror of the wood,
Or some faun-thing that pursued.

In the dead leaves on the ground
Crept a movement; rose a sound:
Everywhere the silence ticked...

White moons may come, white moons may go -
She sleeps where early blossoms blow;
Knows nothing of the leafy June,
That leans above her night and noon,
Crowned now with sunbeam, now with moon,
Watching her roses grow.

The downy moth at twilight comes
And flutters round their honeyed blooms:
Long, lazy clouds, like ivory,
That isle the blue lagoons of sky,
Redden to molten gold and dye
With flame the pine-deep glooms.

Dew, dripping from wet fern and leaf;
The wind, that shakes the violet's sheaf;
The slender sound of water lone,
That makes a harp-string of some stone,
And now a wood bird's glimmering moan,
Seem whisperings there of grief.

Her garden, where the lilacs grew,
Where, on old walls, old roses blew,
Head-heavy with...

There was a boy - not above childish fears -
With steps that faltered now and straining ears,
Timid, irresolute, yet dauntless still,
Who one bright dawn, when each remotest hill
Stood sharp and clear in Heaven's unclouded blue
And all Earth shimmered with fresh-beaded dew,
Risen in the first beams of the gladdening sun,
Walked up into the mountains. One by one
Each towering trunk beneath his sturdy stride
Fell back, and ever wider and more wide
The boundless prospect opened. Long he strayed,
From dawn till the last trace of slanting shade
Had vanished from the canyons, and, dismayed
At that far length to which his path had led,
He paused - at such a height where overhead
The clouds hung close, the air came thin and chill,
And all was hushed and calm and very ...

I.

Thou sit'st among the sunny silences
Of terraced hills and woodland galleries,
Thou utterance of all calm melodies,
Thou lutanist of Earth's most affluent lute,
Where no false note intrudes
To mar the silent music, branch and root,
Charming the fields ripe, orchards and deep woods,
To song similitudes
Of flower and seed and fruit.

II.

Oft have I seen thee, in some sensuous air,
Bewitch the broad wheat-acres everywhere.,
To imitated gold of thy deep hair:
The peach, by thy red lips' delicious trouble,
Blown into gradual dyes
Of crimson; and beheld thy magic double
Dark-blue with fervid influence of thine eyes
The grapes' rotundities,
Bubble by purple bubble.

III.

Deliberate uttered into life intense,

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provenial song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leav...

Low was our pretty Cot: our tallest Rose
Peep'd at the chamber-window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The Sea's faint murmur. In the open air
Our Myrtles blossom'd; and across the porch
Thick Jasmins twined: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refresh'd the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The Valley of Seclusion! Once I saw
(Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quiteness)
A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by,
Bristowa's citizen: methought, it calm'd
His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse
With wiser feelings: for he paus'd, and look'd
With a pleas'd sadness, and gaz'd all around,
Then eyed our Cottage, and gaz'd round again,
And sigh'd, and said, it was a Blesséd Place.
And we were bless'd. Oft with patient...

Greta, what fearful listening! when huge stones
Rumble along thy bed, block after block:
Or, whirling with reiterated shock,
Combat, while darkness aggravates the groans:
But if thou (like Cocytus from the moans
Heard on his rueful margin) thence wert named
The Mourner, thy true nature was defamed,
And the habitual murmur that atones
For thy worst rage, forgotten. Oft as Spring
Decks, on thy sinuous banks, her thousand thrones
Seats of glad instinct and love's caroling,
The concert, for the happy, then may vie
With liveliest peals of birth-day harmony:
To a grieved heart, the notes are benisons.

I sat on cushioned otter-skin:
My word was law from Ith to Emain,
And shook at Inver Amergin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away
From girl and boy and man and beast;
The fields grew fatter day by day,
The wild fowl of the air increased;
And every ancient Ollave said,
While he bent down his fading head.
"He drives away the Northern cold.'
i[They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.]
I sat and mused and drank sweet wine;
A herdsman came from inland valleys,
Crying, the pirates drove his swine
To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.
I called my battle-breaking men
And my loud brazen battle-cars
From rolling vale and rivery glen;
And under the blinking of the stars
Fell on the...

In days gone by, the poets wrote
    Sweet verses to the ladies fair;
Described the nightingale's clear note,
    Or penned an Ode to Daphne's hair.

To dare all for a woman's smile
    Or breathe one's heart out in a rose--
Such trifles now are out of style,
    The scented manuscript must close.

Yet Villon wrote his roundelays,
    And that sweet singer Horace;
But I will sing of other days
    In praise of Clara Morris.

Youth is but the joy of life,
    Not the eternal moping;
We get no happiness from strife
    Nor yet by blindly groping.

All the world's a stage you know
    The men and women actors;
A little joy, a little woe--
    These are but human factors.

The mellow days still come and go,
    The...

Simple enchantress! wreath'd in summer blooms
Of slender bent-stalks topt with feathery down,
Heath's creeping vetch, and glaring yellow brooms,
With ash-keys wavering on thy rushy crown;
Simple enchantress! how I've woo'd thy smiles,
How often sought thee far from flush'd renown;
Sought thee unseen where fountain-waters fell;
Touch'd thy wild reed unheard, in weary toils;
And though my heavy hand thy song defiles,
'Tis hard to leave thee, and to bid farewel.

Simple enchantress! ah, from all renown,
Far off, my soul hath warm'd in bliss to see
The varied figures on thy summer-gown,
That nature's finger works so 'witchingly;
The colour'd flower, the silken leaves that crown
Green nestling bower-bush and high towering tree;
Brooks of the sunny green and sh...

When by the green-wood side, at summer eve,
Poetic visions charm my closing eye;
And fairy-scenes, that Fancy loves to weave,
Shift to wild notes of sweetest Minstrelsy;
'Tis thine to range in busy quest of prey,
Thy feathery antlers quivering with delight,
Brush from my lids the hues of heav'n away,
And all is Solitude, and all is Night!
--Ah now thy barbed shaft, relentless fly,
Unsheaths its terrors in the sultry air!
No guardian sylph, in golden panoply,
Lifts the broad shield, and points the glittering spear.
Now near and nearer rush thy whirring wings,
Thy dragon-scales still wet with human gore.
Hark, thy shrill horn its fearful laram flings!
--I wake in horror, and 'dare sleep no more!'

    I.


Now the dreary winter's over,
Fled with him are grief and pain,
When the trees their bloom recover,
Then the soul is born again.
Spikenard blossoms shaking,
Perfume all the air,
And in bud and flower breaking,
Stands my garden fair.
While with swelling gladness blest,
Heaves my friend's rejoicing breast.
Oh, come home, lost friend of mine,
Scared from out my tent and land.
Drink from me the spicy wine,
Milk and must from out my hand.


Cares which hovered round my brow,
Vanish, while the garden now
Girds itself with myrtle hedges,
    Bright-hued edges
    Round it lie.
    Suddenly
All my sorrows die.
See the breathing myrrh-trees blow,
Aromatic airs enfold me.
While the splendor and the glo...