The wind it sang in the pine-tops, it sang like a humming harp;
The smell of the sun on the bracken was wonderful sweet and sharp,
As sharp as the piney needles, as sweet as the gods were good,
For the wind it sung of the old gods, as I came through the wood!
It sung how long ago the Romans made a road,
And the gods came up from Italy and found them an abode.
It sang of the wayside altars (the pine-tops sighed like the surf),
Of little shrines uplifted, of stone and scented turf,
Of youths divine and immortal, of maids as white as the snow
That glimmered among the thickets a mort of years ago!
All in the cool of dawn, all in the twilight grey,
The gods came up from Italy along the Roman way!
The altar smoke it has drifted and faded afar on the hill;
No wood-nymphs haunt the hollows; the reedy pipes are still;
No more the youth Apollo shall walk in his sunshine clear;
No more the maid Diana shall follow the fallow-deer
(The woodmen grew so wise, the woodmen grew so old,
The gods went back to Italy--or so the story's told!)
But the woods are full of voices and of shy and secret things--
The badger down by the brook-side, the flick of a woodcock's wings,
The plump of a falling fir-cone, the pop of the sun-ripe pods,
And the wind that sings in the pine-tops the song of the ancient gods--
The song of the wind that says the Romans made a road,
And the gods came up from Italy and found them an abode!
P. R. CHALMERS.
July 31, 1912.