Chapter 2

Here we shall commune with her and no other; Care and the battle of life shall cease; Men her degenerate children behind us, Only the might of her beauty shall bind us, Full of rest, as we gaze on the face of our mother, Earth in the health and the strength of her peace.

MORNING ON THE LIÈVRES.

Far above us where a jay Screams his matins to the day, Capped with gold and amethyst, Like a vapour from the forge Of a giant somewhere hid, Out of hearing of the clang Of his hammer, skirts of mist Slowly up the woody gorge Lift and hang.

Softly as a cloud we go, Sky above and sky below, Down the river, and the dip Of the paddles scarcely breaks, With the little silvery drip Of the water as it shakes From the blades, the crystal deep Of the silence of the morn, Of the forest yet asleep, And the river reaches borne In a mirror, purple grey, Sheer away To the misty line of light, Where the forest and the stream In the shadow meet and plight, Like a dream.

From amid a stretch of reeds, Where the lazy river sucks All the water as it bleeds From a little curling creek, And the muskrats peer and sneak In around the sunken wrecks Of a tree that swept the skies Long ago, On a sudden seven ducks With a splashy rustle rise, Stretching out their seven necks, One before, and two behind, And the others all arow, And as steady as the wind With a swivelling whistle go, Through the purple shadow led, Till we only hear their whir In behind a rocky spur, Just ahead.

IN OCTOBER.

Along the waste, a great way off, the pines, Like tall slim priests of storm, stand up and bar The low long strip of dolorous red that lines The under west, where wet winds moan afar. The cornfields all are brown, and brown the meadows With the blown leaves' wind-heapèd traceries, And the brown thistle stems that cast no shadows, And bear no bloom for bees.

As slowly earthward leaf by red leaf slips, The sad trees rustle in chill misery, A soft strange inner sound of pain-crazed lips, That move and murmur incoherently; As if all leaves, that yet have breath, were sighing, With pale hushed throats, for death is at the door, So many low soft masses for the dying Sweet leaves that live no more.

Here I will sit upon this naked stone, Draw my coat closer with my numbèd hands, And hear the ferns sigh, and the wet woods moan, And send my heart out to the ashen lands; And I will ask myself what golden madness, What balmèd breaths of dreamland spicery, What visions of soft laughter and light sadness Were sweet last month to me.

The dry dead leaves flit by with thin wierd tunes, Like failing murmurs of some conquered creed, Graven in mystic markings with strange runes, That none but stars and biting winds may read; Here I will wait a little; I am weary, Not torn with pain of any lurid hue, But only still and very gray and dreary, Sweet sombre lands, like you.

LAMENT OF THE WINDS.

We in sorrow coldly witting, In the bleak world sitting, sitting, By the forest, near the mould, Heard the summer calling, calling, Through the dead leaves falling, falling, That her life grew faint and old.

And we took her up, and bore her, With the leaves that moaned before her, To the holy forest bowers, Where the trees were dense and serried, And her corpse we buried, buried, In the graveyard of the flowers.

Now the leaves, as death grows vaster, Yellowing deeper, dropping faster, All the grave wherein she lies With their bodies cover, cover, With their hearts that love her, love her, For they live not when she dies:

And we left her so, but stay not Of our tears, and yet we may not, Though they coldly thickly fall, Give the dead leaves any, any, For they lie so many, many, That we cannot weep for all.

BALLADE OF SUMMER'S SLEEP.

Sweet summer is gone; they have laid her away-- The last sad hours that were touched with her grace-- In the hush where the ghosts of the dead flowers play; The sleep that is sweet of her slumbering space Let not a sight or a sound erase Of the woe that hath fallen on all the lands: Gather ye, dreams, to her sunny face, Shadow her head with your golden hands.

The woods that are golden and red for a day Girdle the hills in a jewelled case, Like a girl's strange mirth, ere the quick death slay The beautiful life that he hath in chase. Darker and darker the shadows pace Out of the north to the southern sands, Ushers bearing the winter's mace: Keep them away with your woven hands.

The yellow light lies on the wide wastes gray, More bitter and cold than the winds that race, From the skirts of the autumn, tearing away, This way and that way, the woodland lace. In the autumn's cheek is a hectic trace; Behind her the ghost of the winter stands; Sweet summer will moan in her soft gray place: Mantle her head with your glowing hands.

_Envoi._

Till the slayer be slain and the spring displace The might of his arms with her rose-crowned bands, Let her heart not gather a dream that is base: Shadow her head with your golden hands.

WINTER.

The long days came and went; the riotous bees Tore the warm grapes in many a dusty-vine, And men grew faint and thin with too much ease, And Winter gave no sign: But all the while beyond the northmost woods He sat and smiled and watched his spirits play In elfish dance and eery roundelay, Tripping in many moods With snowy curve and fairy crystal shine.

But now the time is come: with southward speed The elfin spirits pass: a secret sting Hath fallen and smitten flower and fruit and weed, And every leafy thing. The wet woods moan: the dead leaves break and fall; In still night-watches wakeful men have heard The muffled pipe of many a passing bird, High over hut and hall, Straining to southward with unresting wing.

And then they come with colder feet, and fret The winds with snow, and tuck the streams to sleep With icy sheet and gleaming coverlet, And fill the valleys deep With curvèd drifts, and a strange music raves Among the pines, sometimes in wails, and then In whistled laughter, till affrighted men Draw close, and into caves And earthy holes the blind beasts curl and creep.

And so all day above the toiling heads Of men's poor chimneys, full of impish freaks, Tearing and twisting in tight-curlèd shreds The vain unnumbered reeks, The Winter speeds his fairies forth and mocks Poor bitten men with laughter icy cold, Turning the brown of youth to white and old With hoary-woven locks, And grey men young with roses in their cheeks.

And after thaws, when liberal water swells The bursting eaves, he biddeth drip and grow The curly horns of ribbèd icicles In many a beard-like row. In secret moods of mercy and soft dole, Old warpèd wrecks and things of mouldering death That summer scorns and man abandoneth His careful hands console With lawny robes and draperies of snow.

And when night comes, his spirits with chill feet, Winged with white mirth and noiseless mockery, Across men's pallid windows peer and fleet, And smiling silverly Draw with mute fingers on the frosted glass Quaint fairy shapes of icèd witcheries, Pale flowers and glinting ferns and frigid trees And meads of mystic grass, Graven in many an austere phantasy.

But far away the Winter dreams alone, Rustling among his snow-drifts, and resigns Cold fondling ears to hear the cedars moan In dusky-skirted lines Strange answers of an ancient runic call; Or somewhere watches with his antique eyes, Gray-chill with frosty-lidded reveries, The silvery moonshine fall In misty wedges through his girth of pines.

Poor mortals haste and hide away: creep soon Into your icy beds: the embers die; And on your frosted panes the pallid moon Is glimmering brokenly. Mutter faint prayers that spring will come e'erwhile, Scarring with thaws and dripping days and nights The shining majesty of him that smites And slays you with a smile Upon his silvery lips, of glinting mockery.

WINTER HUES RECALLED.

Life is not all for effort: there are hours, When fancy breaks from the exacting will, And rebel thought takes schoolboy's holiday, Rejoicing in its idle strength. 'Tis then, And only at such moments, that we know The treasure of hours gone--scenes once beheld, Sweet voices and words bright and beautiful, Impetuous deeds that woke the God within us, The loveliness of forms and thoughts and colors, A moment marked and then as soon forgotten. These things are ever near us, laid away, Hidden and waiting the appropriate times, In the quiet garner-house of memory. There in the silent unaccounted depth, Beneath the heated strainage and the rush That teem the noisy surface of the hours, All things that ever touched us are stored up, Growing more mellow like sealed wine with age; We thought them dead, and they are but asleep. In moments when the heart is most at rest And least expectant, from the luminous doors, And sacred dwelling place of things unfeared, They issue forth, and we who never knew Till then how potent and how real they were, Take them, and wonder, and so bless the hour.

Such gifts are sweetest when unsought. To me, As I was loitering lately in my dreams, Passing from one remembrance to another, Like him who reads upon an outstretched map, Content and idly happy, these rose up, Out of that magic well-stored picture house, No dream, rather a thing most keenly real, The memory of a moment, when with feet, Arrested and spell bound, and captured eyes, Made wide with joy and wonder, I beheld The spaces of a white and wintery land Swept with the fire of sunset, all its width Vale, forest, town, and misty eminence, A miracle of color and of beauty.

I had walked out, as I remember now, With covered ears, for the bright air was keen, To southward up the gleaming snow-packed fields, With the snowshoer's long rejoicing stride, Marching at ease. It was a radiant day In February, the month of the great struggle 'Twixt sun and frost, when with advancing spears, The glittering golden vanguard of the spring Holds the broad winter's yet unbroken rear In long-closed wavering contest. Thin pale threads Like streaks of ash across the far off blue Were drawn, nor seemed to move. A brooding silence Kept all the land, a stillness as of sleep; But in the east the grey and motionless woods, Watching the great sun's fiery slow decline, Grew deep with gold. To westward all was silver. An hour had passed above me; I had reached The loftiest level of the snow-piled fields, Clear eyed, but unobservant, noting not, That all the plain beneath me and the hills Took on a change of color splendid, gradual, Leaving no spot the same; nor that the sun Now like a fiery torrent overflamed The great line of the west. Ere yet I turned With long stride homeward, being heated With the loose swinging motion, weary too, Nor uninclined to rest, a buried fence, Whose topmost log just shouldered from the snow, Made me a seat, and thence with heated cheeks, Grazed by the northwind's edge of stinging ice, I looked far out upon the snow-bound waste, The lifting hills and intersecting forests, The scarce marked courses of the buried streams, And as I looked lost memory of the frost, Transfixed with wonder, overborne with joy. I saw them in their silence and their beauty, Swept by the sunset's rapid hand of fire, Sudden, mysterious, every moment deepening To some new majesty of rose or flame. The whole broad west was like a molten sea Of crimson. In the north the light-lined hills Were veiled far off as with a mist of rose Wondrous and soft. Along the darkening east The gold of all the forests slowly changed To purple. In the valley far before me, Low sunk in sapphire shadows, from its hills, Softer and lovelier than an opening flower, Uprose a city with its sun-touched towers, A bunch of amethysts. Like one spell-bound Caught in the presence of some god, I stood, Nor felt the keen wind and the deadly air, But watched the sun go down, and watched the gold Fade from the town and the withdrawing hills, Their westward shapes athwart the dusky red Freeze into sapphire, saw the arc of rose Rise ever higher in the violet east, Above the frore front of the uprearing night Remorsefully soft and sweet. Then I awoke As from a dream, and from my shoulders shook The warning chill, till then unfelt, unfeared.

STORM.

Out of the grey northwest, where many a day gone by Ye tugged and howled in your tempestuous grot, And evermore the huge frost giants lie, Your wizard guards in vigilance unforgot, Out of the grey northwest, for now the bonds are riven, On wide white wings your thongless flight is driven, That lulls but resteth not.

And all the grey day long, and all the dense wild night Ye wheel and hurry with the sheeted snow, By cedared waste and many a pine-dark height, Across white rivers frozen fast below; Over the lonely forests, where the flowers yet sleeping Turn in their narrow beds with dreams of weeping In some remembered woe;

Across the unfenced wide marsh levels, where the dry Brown ferns sigh out, and last year's sedges scold In some drear language, rustling haggardly Their thin dead leaves and dusky hoods of gold; Across grey beechwoods where the pallid leaves unfalling In the blind gusts like homeless ghosts are calling With voices cracked and old;

Across the solitary clearings, where the low Fierce gusts howl through the blinded woods, and round The buried shanties all day long the snow Sifts and piles up in many a spectral mound; Across lone villages in eery wildernesses Whose hidden life no living shape confesses Nor any human sound;

Across the serried masses of dim cities, blown Full of the snow that ever shifts and swells, While far above them all their towers of stone Stand and beat back your fierce and tyrannous spells, And hour by hour send out, like voices torn and broken Of battling giants that have grandly spoken, The veering sound of bells;

So day and night, oh wind, with hiss and moan you fleet, Where once long gone on many a green-leafed day Your gentler brethren wandered with light feet And sang with voices soft and sweet as they, The same blind thought that you with wilder might are speaking, Seeking the same strange thing that you are seeking In this your stormier way.

Oh wind, wild-voicèd brother, in your northern cave, My spirit also being so beset With pride and pain, I heard you beat and rave, Grinding your chains with furious howl and fret, Knowing full well that all earth's moving things inherit The same chained might and madness of the spirit, That none may quite forget.

You in your cave of snows, we in our narrow girth Of need and sense, forever chafe and pine; Only in moods of some demonic birth Our souls take fire, our flashing wings untwine; Even like you, mad wind, above our broken prison, With streaming hair and maddened eyes uprisen, We dream ourselves divine;

Mad moods that come and go in some mysterious way, That flash and fall, none knoweth how or why, Oh wind, our brother, they are yours to-day, The stormy joy, the sweeping mastery; Deep in our narrow cells, we hear you, we awaken With hands afret and bosoms strangely shaken, We answer to your cry.

I most that love you, wind, when you are fierce and free, In these dull fetters cannot long remain; Lo, I will rise and break my thongs and flee Forth to your drift and beating, till my brain Even for an hour grow wild in your divine embraces, And then creep back into mine earthly traces, And bind me with my chain.

Nay, wind, I hear you, desperate brother, in your might Whistle and howl; I shall not tarry long, And though the day be blind and fierce, the night Be dense and wild, I still am glad and strong To meet you face to face; through all your gust and drifting With brow held high, my joyous hands uplifting, I cry you song for song.

MIDNIGHT.

From where I sit, I see the stars, And down the chilly floor The moon between the frozen bars Is glimmering dim and hoar.

Without in many a peakèd mound The glinting snowdrifts lie; There is no voice or living sound; The embers slowly die.

Yet some wild thing is in mine ear; I hold my breath and hark; Out of the depth I seem to hear A crying in the dark:

No sound of man or wife or child, No sound of beast that groans, Or of the wind that whistles wild, Or of the tree that moans:

I know not what it is I hear; I bend my head and hark: I cannot drive it from mine ear, That crying in the dark.

SONG OF THE STREAM-DROPS.

By silent forest and field and mossy stone, We come from the wooded hill, and we go to the sea. We labour, and sing sweet songs, but we never moan, For our mother, the sea, is calling us cheerily. We have heard her calling us many and many a day From the cool grey stones and the white sands far away.

The way is long, and winding and slow is the track, The sharp rocks fret us, the eddies bring us delay, But we sing sweet songs to our mother, and answer her back; Gladly we answer our mother, sweetly repay. Oh, we hear, we hear her singing wherever we roam, Far, far away in the silence, calling us home.

Poor mortal, your ears are dull, and you cannot hear; But we, we hear it, the breast of our mother abeat; Low, far away, sweet and solemn and clear, Under the hush of the night, under the noontide heat: And we sing sweet songs to our mother, for so we shall please her best, Songs of beauty and peace, freedom and infinite rest.

We sing, and sing, through the grass and the stones and the reeds, And we never grow tired, though we journey ever and aye, Dreaming, and dreaming, wherever the long way leads, Of the far cool rocks and the rush of the wind and the spray. Under the sun and the stars we murmur and dance and are free, And we dream and dream of our mother, the width of the sheltering sea.

BETWEEN THE RAPIDS.

The point is turned; the twilight shadow fills The wheeling stream, the soft receding shore, And on our ears from deep among the hills Breaks now the rapid's sudden quickening roar. Ah yet the same, or have they changed their face, The fair green fields, and can it still be seen, The white log cottage near the mountain's base, So bright and quiet, so home-like and serene? Ah, well I question, for as five years go, How many blessings fall, and how much woe.

Aye there they are, nor have they changed their cheer, The fields, the hut, the leafy mountain brows; Across the lonely dusk again I hear The loitering bells, the lowing of the cows, The bleat of many sheep, the stilly rush Of the low whispering river, and through all, Soft human tongues that break the deepening hush With faint-heard song or desultory call: Oh comrades hold; the longest reach is past; The stream runs swift, and we are flying fast.

The shore, the fields, the cottage just the same, But how with them whose memory makes them sweet? Oh if I called them, hailing name by name, Would the same lips the same old shouts repeat? Have the rough years, so big with death and ill, Gone lightly by and left them smiling yet? Wild black-eyed Jeanne whose tongue was never still, Old wrinkled Picaud, Pierre and pale Lisette, The homely hearts that never cared to range, While life's wide fields were filled with rush and change.

And where is Jacques, and where is Verginie? I cannot tell; the fields are all a blur. The lowing cows whose shapes I scarcely see, Oh do they wait and do they call for her? And is she changed, or is her heart still clear As wind or morning, light as river foam? Or have life's changes borne her far from here, And far from rest, and far from help and home? Ah comrades, soft, and let us rest awhile, For arms grow tired with paddling many a mile.

The woods grow wild, and from the rising shore The cool wind creeps, the faint wood odours steal; Like ghosts adown the river's blackening floor The misty fumes begin to creep and reel. Once more I leave you, wandering toward the night, Sweet home, sweet heart, that would have held me in; Whither I go I know not, and the light Is faint before, and rest is hard to win. Ah sweet ye were and near to heaven's gate; But youth is blind and wisdom comes too late.

Blacker and loftier grow the woods, and hark! The freshening roar! The chute is near us now, And dim the canyon grows, and inky dark The water whispering from the birchen prow. One long last look, and many a sad adieu, While eyes can see and heart can feel you yet, I leave sweet home and sweeter hearts to you, A prayer for Picaud, one for pale Lisette, A kiss for Pierre, my little Jacques, and thee, A sigh for Jeanne, a sob for Verginie.

Oh, does she still remember? Is the dream Now dead, or has she found another mate? So near, so dear; and ah, so swift the stream; Even now perhaps it were not yet too late. But oh, what matter; for before the night Has reached its middle, we have far to go: Bend to your paddles, comrades; see, the light Ebbs off apace; we must not linger so. Aye thus it is! Heaven gleams and then is gone Once, twice, it smiles, and still we wander on.

NEW YEAR'S EVE.

Once on the year's last eve in my mind's might Sitting in dreams, not sad, nor quite elysian, Balancing all 'twixt wonder and derision, Methought my body and all this world took flight, And vanished from me, as a dream, outright; Leaning out thus in sudden strange decision, I saw as it were in the flashing of a vision, Far down between the tall towers of the night, Borne by great winds in awful unison, The teeming masses of mankind sweep by, Even as a glittering river with deep sound And innumerable banners, rolling on Over the starry border glooms that bound The last gray space in dim eternity.