But winds foreboding fill the desolate night
And die at dawning down wild woodland ways,
or in May "couched in cool shadow" he hears
The bee-throngs murmurous in the golden fern,
The wood-doves veiled by depths of flickering green,
for him the music of the spheres is in it all. Whether at midnight
The moon, a ghost of her sweet self,
* * * * *
Creeps up the gray, funereal sky wearily, how wearily,
or morning comes "with gracious breath of sunlight," it is a part of
glorious Nature, his star-crowned Queen, his sun-clad goddess.
To no other heart has the pine forest come so near unfolding its
immemorial secret. That poet-mind was a wind-harp, and its quivering
strings echoed to every message that came from the dim old woods on
the "soft whispers of the twilight breeze," the flutterings of the
newly awakened morn or the crash of the storm. "The Dryad of the Pine"
bent "earth-yearning branches" to give him loving greeting and receive
his quick response:
Leaning on thee, I feel the subtlest thrill
Stir thy dusk limbs, tho' all the heavens are still,
And 'neath thy rings of rugged fretwork mark
What seems a heart-throb muffled in the dark.
"The imprisoned spirits of all winds that blow" echoed to his ear from
the heart of the pine-cone fallen from "the wavering height of yon
monarchal pine."
When a glorious pine, to him a living soul, falls under the axe he
hears "the wail of Dryads in their last distress."
In the greenery of his loved and loving pines, with memories happy,
though touched to tender sadness by the sorrows that had come to the
old-time group of friends, blessed with the companionship of the two
loving souls who were dearest to him of all the world, he sang the
melodies of his heart till a cold hand swept across the strings of his
wonderful harp and chilled them to silence.
In his last year of earth he was invited to deliver at Vanderbilt
University a series of lectures on poetry and literature. Before the
invitation reached him he had "fallen into that perfect peace that
waits for all."
"THE FLAME-BORN POET"