There, where they haunt each hollow!
Dreams luring us with oread feet to follow,
With flying feet of beams,
Fleeter and lighter than the fleetest swallow:
Dreams, holding us with dryad glooms and gleams,
With Naiad eyes, far stiller than still streams,
That have beheld and still reflect, it seems,
The god Apollo.--
Forth, forth, my heart, and let us find our dreams!
Out, out, my heart, the world is white with spring.
Long have our dreams been pleaders:
Now let them be our firm but gentle leaders.
Come, let us forth and sing
Among the amber-emerald-tufted cedars,
And balm-o’-Gileads, cotton-woods, a-swing
Like giant censers, that, from leaf-cusps fling
Balsams of gummy gold, bewildering
The winds their feeders.
Out, out, my heart, the world is white with spring.
Up, up, my heart, and all thy hope put on.
Array thyself in splendor.
Like some bright dragon-fly, some May-fly slender,
The irised lamels don
Of thy new armor; and, where burns the centre,
Refulgent, of the opening rose of dawn,
Spread thy wild wings, and, ere the hour be gone,
Bright as a blast from some bold clarion,
Thy Dream-world enter.--
Up, up, my heart, and all thy hope put on.
IV
And then I heard it singing,
The wind that touched my hair,
A song of wild expression,
A song that called in session
The wild-flowers sweetly swinging,
The wild-flowers lightly flinging
Their tresses to the air.
And first, beneath a bramble arch,
The bloodroot rose; each bloom a torch
Of hollow snow, within which, bright,
The calyx grottoed golden light.
Hepatica and bluet,
And gold corydalis,
Arose as to an aria;
Then wild-phlox and dentaria,
In rapture, ere they knew it,
Trooped forward, nodding to it,
Faint as a first star is.
And then a music,--to the ear
Inaudible,--I seemed to hear;
A symphony that seemed to rise
And speak in colors to the eyes.
I saw the Jacob’s-ladder
Ring violet peal on peal
Of perfume, azure-swinging;
The bluebell slimly ringing
Its purple chimes; and, gladder,
Green note on note, the madder
Bells of the Solomon’s-seal.
Now very near, now faintly lost,
I saw their fragrant music tossed;
Mixed dimly with white interludes
Of trilliums starring cool the woods.
Then choral, solitary,
I saw the celandine
Smite bright its golden cymbals,
The starwort shake its timbrels,
The whiteheart’s horns of Fairy,
With many a flourish airy,
Strike silvery into line.
And, lo, my soul they seemed to draw,
By chords of loveliness and awe
Into a Fairy world afar
Where all man’s dreams and longings are.
V
And then a spirit looked down at me
Out of the deeps of the opal morn:
Its eyes were blue as a sunlit sea,
And young with the joy of a star that has just been born:
And I seemed to hear, with my soul, the rose of its cool mouth say:--
“Long I lay, long I lay,
High on the Hills of the Break-of-Day,
Where ever the light is green and gray,
And the gleam of the moon is a silvery spray,
And the stars are glimmering bubbles.
Now from the Hills of the Break-of-Day
I come, I come, on a rainbow ray,
To laugh and sparkle, to leap and play,
And blow from the face of the world away,
Like mists, its griefs and troubles.”
VI
And now that the dawn is everywhere,
Let us take this path through this wild, green place,
Where the rattlesnake-weed shows its yellow face,
And the lichens cover the rocks with lace:
Where tannin-tinct is the woodland air,
Let us take this path through the oaks where, thin,
The low leaves whisper, “The day is fair”;
And waters murmur, “Come in, come in,
Where you can hark to our waterfalls,
And the wind of their foam can play with your hair,
And soothe away care.--
Come here, come here, where our water calls.”
Berry blossoms, that seem to flow
As the winds blow,
Blackberry blossoms swing and sway
To and fro
Along the way,
Like ocean spray on a breezy day,
Over the green of the grass as foam on the green of a bay,
When the world is white and green with the white and the green of May.
VII
The dewberries are blooming now;
The days are long, the nights are short;
Each haw-tree and each dogwood bough
Is bleached with bloom, and seems a part,--
Reflected palely on her brow,--
Of dreams that haunt the Year’s young heart.
But this will pass; and presently
The world forget the spring that was;
And underneath the wild-plum tree,
’Mid hornet hum and wild-bee’s buzz,
Summer, in dreamy reverie,
Will sit all warm and amorous.
Summer, with drowsy eyes and hair,
Who walks the orchard aisles between;
Whose hot touch tans the freckled pear,
And crimsons peach and nectarine;
And, in the vineyard everywhere,
Bubbles with blue the grape’s ripe green.
Where now the briers blossoming are,
Soon will the berries darkly glow;
Then Summer pass: and star on star,
Where now the grass is strewn below
With petals, soon, both near and far,
Will lie the obliterating snow.
VIII
But now the bluets blooming,
The bluets brightly blue,
O’er which the bees go booming,
Drunk with the honey-dew,
From wood-ways which they strew,
Make eyes of love at you....
O slender Quaker-ladies,
With eyes of heavenly hue,
Who, where the mossy shade is,
Hold quiet Quaker-meeting,
Now tell me, is it true
That these wild-bees are raiders?
Bold gold-galloonéd raiders?
Gold-belted ambuscaders?--
Or are they serenaders,
Your gold-hipped serenaders,
That, to your ears repeating
Old ballads, come to woo,
And win the hearts of you,
The golden hearts of you?
And here the bells of th’ huckleberries toss, so it seems, in time,
Delicate, tenderly white, thick by the wildwood way;
Clusters swinging, it seems, inaudible peals of rhyme,
Music visibly dropped from the virginal lips of the May,
Crystally dropped, so it seems, bar upon blossoming bar,
Pendent, pensively pale, star upon hollowed star.
IX
The star-flower now, that disks with gold
The woodland moss, the forest grass,
Already in a day is old,
Already doth its beauty pass;
Soon, undistinguished, with the mould
’Twill mingle and ’twill mix, alas.
The bluet, too, that spreads its skies,
Its little heavens, at our feet;
And crowfoot-bloom, that, with soft eyes
Of amber, now our eyes doth greet,
Shall fade and pass, and none surmise
How once they made the Maytime sweet.
X
But the crowfoot-bloom still trails its gold
Along the edges of the oak-wood old;
And there, where spreads the pond, still white are seen
The lilies islanded between
The pads’ round archipelagoes of green;
The jade-dark pads that pave
The water’s wrinkled wave;
In which the vireo and the sparrow lave
Their fluttered breasts and wings,
Preening their backs, with many twitterings,
With necks the moisture streaks;
Then dipping deep their beaks,
To which the beaded coolness clings,
They bend their mellow throats
And let the freshness trickle into notes.
And now you hear
The red-capped woodpecker rap near;
And now that acrobat,
The yellow-breasted chat,
Calls high and clear,
Chuckling his grotesque music from
Some bough that he hath clomb.
And now, and now,
Upon another bough,
Hark how the honey-throated thrush
Scatters the forest’s listening hush
With notes of limpid harmony,
Taking the woods with witchery--
Or is ’t a spirit, none can see.
Hid in the top of some old tree,
Who, in his house of leaves, of haunted green,
Keeps trying, silver-sweet, his sunbeam flute serene?
XI
And then as I listened I seemed to see,
Out of the sunset’s ruin of gold,
A presence, a spirit, look down at me,
With eyes that were grave with the grief of a world grown old;
And I seemed to hear, with my soul, the flame of its sad mouth sigh:
“Now good-by, now good-by.
Down to the Caves of the Night go I;
Where a shadowy couch of the purple sky,
That the moon and the starlight curtain high,
Is spread for my joy and sorrow:
Down to the Caves of the Night go I,
Where side by side with mystery
And all the Yesterdays I’ll lie;
And where from my body, before I die,
Will be born the young To-morrow.”
XII
And here where the dusk steals on, you see,
Violet-mantled, from tree to tree,
The milkwort’s spike of lavender hue,--
Of rosy blue,--
Tipped by the weight of a passing bee,--
Nods like a goblin night-cap, slim, sedate,
That night shall tassel with the dew,
Beneath a canopy of rose and rue.
And as the purple state
Of twilight crowds the sunset’s crimson gate,
Now one, now two,
Drifting the oaks’ dark vistas through,
The screech-owl’s cry of “Who, oh, who,
Who stays so late?”
Drops like a challenge down to you.
The silence deepens; it seems so still,
That, if you laid to the tree your ear,
You too might hear
Its great roots growing into the hill;
Or there on the twig of the oak-tree tall,
The gray-green egg in the gray-green gall
Split, and the little round worm and white,
That grows to a gnat in a summer night,
Uncurl in its nest as it dreams of flight.
In the heart of the weed that grows near by,--
If you laid your ear
To a leaflet near,--
You too might hear, if you, too, would try,
The little gray worm, that becomes a fly
A gray wood-fly, a rainbowed fly,
As it feels a yearning for wings within,
Minute of movement, steadily,--
As a leaf-bud pushes from forth a tree,--
Under the milk of its larval skin,
The outward pressure of wings begin.
Far off a vesper-sparrow lifts its song,
Lost in the woods that now are beryl-wan;
The path is drowned in dusk, is almost gone,
Where now a fox or rabbit steals along:
Dark is each vine-roofed hollow where, withdrawn,
The creek-frog sounds his guttural gong,
Like some squat dwarf or gnome,
Seated upon his temple’s oozy dome,
Summoning the faithful unto prayer,
Muezzin-like, the worshipers of the moon,
The insect people of the earth and air,
Who join him in his twilight tune.
Along the path, where the lizard hides,
An instant shadow, the spider glides;
The hairy spider, that haunts the way,
Crouching black by its earth-bored hole,
An insect ogre, that lairs with the mole,
Hungry, seeking its insect prey,
Fast to follow and swift to slay.--
And over your hands and over your face
The cobweb brushes its phantom lace:
And now, from many a stealthy place,
Woolly-winged and gossamer-gray,
The forest moths come fluttering,
Marked and mottled with lichen hues,
Seal-soft umbers and downy blues,
Dark as the bark to which they cling.
XIII
Now in the hollow of a hill,--
Like a glow-worm held in a giant hand,--
Under the sunset’s last red band,
And one star hued like a daffodil,
The windowed lamp of a cabin glows;
The charcoal-burner’s, whose hut is poor
But always open; beside whose door
An oak grows gnarled and a pine stands slim.
Clean of soul, though of feature grim,
Here he houses where no one knows,
His only neighbors the cawing crows,
That make a roost of the pine’s top limb:
His only friend the fiddle he bows
As he sits at his door in the eve’s repose
Making it chuckle and sing and speak,
Lovingly pressed to his swarthy cheek.
And over many a root, through flowers and weeds,
Past lonely places where the raccoon breeds,
By many a rock and water lying dim,
Roofed with the brier and the bramble-rose,
Under a star and the new-moon’s rim,
Downward the wood-way leads to him,
Down where his lone lamp gleams and glows,
A pencil slim
Of marigold light under leaf and limb.
[Illustration: Making it chuckle and sing and speak Page 328
_In Solitary Places_]
XIV
Ere that small sisterhood of misty stars,
The Pleiadës, consents to grace the sky;
While still through sunset’s golds and cinnabars
The evening-star, like an Aladdin eye
Of bright enchantment, at the day’s last hour,
Looks downward from its twilight-builded tower,
Listen, and you may hear, now low, now high,
A voice, a summons, fainter than a flower.
There is a fellowship so still and sweet,
A brotherhood, that speaks, unwordable,
In every tree, in every stream you meet,
The soul is fain to dream beneath its spell.--
And heart-admitted to their presence there,
Those intimacies of the earth and air,
It shall hear things too wonderful to tell,
Too deep to interpret, and more sweet than prayer.
And you may see the things that are unseen,
And hear the things that never have been heard:
The whisper of the woods, in gray and green,
Will walk by you, its heart a wildwood bird;
Or by your side, in hushed and solemn wise,
The silence sit; and clothed in glimmering dyes
Of pearl and purple, with a sunset word,
The dusk steal to you with tenebrious eyes.
Then through the ugliness that toils in night.
Uncouth, obscure, that hates the glare of day,
Dull things that pierce the earth, avoid the light,
And hide themselves in clamminess and clay,--
The dumb, ungainly things, that make a home
Of mud and mire they hill and honeycomb,--
Through these, perhaps, in some mysterious way
Beauty may speak, fairer than wind-wild foam.
Not as it speaks--an eagle message--drawn
In starry vastness from night’s labyrinths:
Not uttering itself from forth the dawn
In egret hues: nor from the cloud-built plinths
Of sunset’s splendor, speaking burningly
Unto the spirit; nor from flow’rs the bee
Makes mouths of musk of, cymes of hyacinths,--
But from the things that type humility.
From things despised.--Ev’n from the crawfish there,
Hollowing its house of ooze--a wet, vague sound
Of sleepy slime; or from the mole, whose lair,
Blind-tunneled, corridors the earth around--
Beauty may draw her truths, as draws its wings
The butterfly from the dull worm that clings,
Cocoon and chrysalis; and from the ground
Address the soul through even senseless things.
The soul, that oft hath heard the trees’ huge roots
Fumble the darkness, clutching at the soil;
The bird-like beaks of the imprisoned shoots
Peck through the bark and into leaves uncoil;
Hath heard the buried seed split through its pod,
Groping its blind way up to light and God;
The fungus, laboring with gnome-like toil,
Heave slow its white orb through the encircling sod.
The winds and waters, stars and streams and flowers,
The very stones have tongues: and moss and fern
And even lichens speak. This world of ours
Is eloquent with things that bid us learn
To pierce appearances, and so to mark,
Within the rock and underneath the bark,
Heard through some inward sense, the dreams that turn
Outward to light and beauty from the dark.
XV
Then it came to pass as I gazed on space
That I met with Mystery, face to face.
Within her eyes my wondering soul beheld
The eons past, the eons yet to come
At cosmic labor; and the stars,--that swelled,
Flaming or nebulous, from the darkness dumb,
In their appointed places, world and sun,
I saw were truths made visible, whose sum
Proclaimed one truth, the Word of Him, the One.
And it came to pass as I went my ways
That I met with Beauty, face to face.
Within her eyes my worshiping spirit saw
The moments busy with the dreams whence spring
Earth’s lovelinesses: and all things that awe
Man’s soul with their perfection--everything
That buds and bourgeons, blossoming above--
I saw were letters of enduring law,
Whose chapters make the beautiful book of Love.
THE MAN HUNT
The woods stretch deep to the mountain side,
And the brush is wild where a man may hide.
They have brought the bloodhounds up again
To the roadside rock where they found the slain.
They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they
Have taken the trail to the mountain way.
Three times they circled the trail and crossed,
And thrice they found it and thrice they lost.
Now straight through the trees and the underbrush
They follow the scent through the forest’s hush.
And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear
In the heart of the wood that the man must hear.
The man who crouches among the trees
From the stern-faced men who follow these.
A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed
And the trail of the hunted again is lost.
An upturned pebble, a bit of ground
A heel has trampled--the trail is found.
And the woods reëcho the bloodhounds’ bay
As again they take to the mountain way.
A rock, a ribbon of road, a ledge,
With a pine tree clutching its crumbling edge.
A pine, that the lightning long since clave,
Whose huge roots hollow a ragged cave.
A shout, a curse, and a face aghast,
And the human quarry is laired at last.
The human quarry with clay-clogged hair
And eyes of terror who waits them there.
That glares and crouches and rising then
Hurls clods and curses at dogs and men.
Until the blow of a gun-butt lays
Him stunned and bleeding upon his face.
A rope; a prayer; and an oak-tree near,
And a score of hands to swing him clear.
A grim, black thing for the setting sun
And the moon and the stars to look upon.
THE FOREST OF SHADOWS
Deep in the hush of a mighty wood
I came to a place of dread and dream,
And forms of shadows, whose shapes elude
The searching swords of the sun’s dim gleam,
Builders of silence and solitude.
And there, where a glimmering water crept
From rock to rock with a slumberous sound,
Tired to tears, on the mossy ground,
Under a tree I lay and slept.
Was it the heart of an olden oak?
Was it the soul of a flower that died?
Or was it the wild-rose there that spoke,
The wilding lily that palely sighed?--
For all on a sudden it seemed I awoke:
And the leaves and the flowers were all intent
On a visible something of light and bloom--
A presence, felt as a wild perfume,
Or beautiful music, that came and went.
And all the grief I had known was gone,
And all the anguish of heart and soul;
And the burden of care that had made me wan
Lifted and left me young and whole
As once in the flush of my youth’s dead dawn.
And lo! it was night. And the oval moon,
A silvery spectre, paced the wood:
And there in its light, like snow, she stood,
As starry still as a star a-swoon.
At first I thought that I looked into
A shadowy water of violet,
Where the faint reflection of one I knew,
Long dead, gazed up from its mirror wet,
Till she smiled in my face as the living do:
Till I felt her touch, and heard her say,
In a voice as still as a rose unfolds,--
“You have come at last: now nothing holds:
Give me your hand: let us wander away.
“Let us wander away through the Shadow Wood,
Through the Shadow Wood to the Shadow Land,
Where the trees have speech and the blossoms brood,
Like visible music; and, hand in hand,
The winds and the waves go, rainbow-hued:
Where ever the voice of beauty sighs,
And ever the dance of dreams goes on;
Where nothing grows old: and the dead and gone,
And the loved and the lost, smile into your eyes.
“Let us wander away! let us wander away!--
Do you hear them calling, ‘Come here and live’?
Do you hear what the trees and the flowers say,
Wonderful, wild, and imperative,
Hushed as the hues of the dawn of day?--
They say, ‘Your life, that was rose and rue,
In a world of shadows where all things die,
Where beauty is dust, and love, a lie,
Is ended. Come! we are waiting for you.’”
And she took my hand: and the trees around
Seemed whispering something I dared not hear;
And the taciturn flowers, that strewed the ground,
Seemed thinking something I felt with fear--
A beautiful something that made no sound.--
And she led me on through the forest old,
Where the moon and the midnight stood on guard,--
Sentinel spirits that shimmered the sward,
Silver and sable and glimmering gold.
And then in a moment I knew.... I knew
What the trees had whispered, the winds had said;
What the flowers had thought in their hearts of dew,
And the stars had syllabled overhead--
And she bent above me and smiled, “’Tis true!
Heart of my heart, you have heard aright.--
Look in my eyes and draw me near!
Look in my face and have no fear!--
Heart of my heart, you died to-night!”
“ROSE LEAVES, WHEN THE ROSE IS DEAD”
See how the rose leaves fall,
The rose leaves fall and fade;
And by the wall, in shade funereal,
How leaf on leaf is laid,
Withered and soiled and frayed!
How red the rose leaves fall--
And in the ancient trees,
That stretch their ghostly arms about the Hall,
Burdened with mysteries,
How sadly sighs the breeze!
How soft the rose leaves fall--
The rose leaves fall and lie!
While over them dull slugs and beetles crawl,
And, palely glimmering by,
The glow-worm trails its eye.
How thick the rose leaves fall,
And strew the garden way!
For snails to slime and spotted toads to sprawl,
And, plodding past each day,
Coarse feet to tread in clay.
How fast they fade and fall
Where Beauty, carved in stone,
With broken hands veils her dead eyes, and, tall,
White in the moonlight lone,
Stands like a marble moan.
How slow they drift and fall
And strew the fountained pool,
That, in the nymph-carved basin by the wall,
Reflects, in darkness cool,
Ruin made beautiful.
How red the rose leaves fall,
Fall, and like blood remain
Upon the dial’s disk, whose pedestal,
Black-mossed, and dark with stain,
Crumbles in sun and rain.
How dim they seem to fall
Around one where she stands,
Deep in their midst, beyond the years’ recall,
Reaching pale, passionate hands
Into the past’s vague lands.
How still the rose leaves fall
Around them as they meet
As oft of old! she, in her gem-pinned shawl
Of white; and he, complete
In black from head to feet.
How faint the rose leaves fall
Around them where, it seems,
He holds her clasped, parting from her and all
His heart’s wild hopes and dreams,
There in the moon’s pale beams!
Around them rose leaves fall--
And in the stress and urge
Of winds that strew them wanly over all,
With deep, autumnal surge,
There floats a funeral dirge:--
“See how the rose leaves fall
Upon thy dead, O soul!
The rose leaves of the love that once in thrall
Held thee, beyond control,
Making thy heart’s world whole.
“God help them still to fall
Around thee, bowed above
The face within thy heart, beneath the pall,
The perished face thereof,
The beautiful face of Love.”
MUSIC AND MOONLIGHT
White roses, like a mist
Upon a terraced height;
And ’mid the roses, opal, moonbeam kissed,
A fountain falling white.
And as the full moon flows,
Orb’d fire, into a cloud,
There is a fragrant sound as if a rose
Sighed its sweet soul aloud.
There is a whisper pale,
As if a rose awoke,
And, having heard in sleep the nightingale,
Still dreaming of it spoke.
Now, as from some vast shell
A giant pearl rolls white,
From the dividing cloud, that winds compel,
The moon sweeps, big and bright.
Moon-mists and pale perfumes,
Wind-wafted through the dusk:
There is a sound as if unfolding blooms
Voiced their sweet thoughts in musk.
A spirit is abroad
Of music and of sleep;
The moon and mists have made for it a road
Adown the violet deep.
It breathes a tale to me,
A tale of ancient day;
And, like a dream, again I seem to see
Those towers old and gray.
That castle by the foam,
Where once our hearts made moan:
And through the night again you seem to come
Down statued stairs of stone.
Again I feel your hair,
Dark, fragrant, deep and cool:
You lift your face up, pale with its despair,
And wildly beautiful.
Again your form I strain,
Again, unto my heart;
Again your lips, again and yet again,
I press ... and then we part.
As centuries ago
We did in Camelot;
Where once we lived that life of bliss and woe,
That you remember not.
When you were Guinevere,
And I was Launcelot....
I have remembered many and many a year,
And you--you have forgot.
THE AWAKENING
God made that night of pearl and ivory,
Perfect and holy as a holy thought
Born of perfection, dreams, and ecstasy,
In love and silence wrought.
And she, who lay where, through the casement falling,
The moonlight clasped with arms of vapory gold
Her Danaë beauty, seemed to hear a calling
Deep in the garden old.
And then it seemed, through some strange sense, she heard
The roses softly speaking in the night,--
Or was it but the nocturne of a bird
Haunting the white moonlight?
It seemed a fragrant whisper vaguely roaming
From rose to rose, a language sweet that blushed,
Saying, “Who comes? Who is this swiftly coming,
With face so dim and hushed?
“And now, and now we hear a wild heart beating--
Whose heart is this that beats among our blooms?
Whose every pulse in rapture keeps repeating
Wild words like wild perfumes?” ...
And then it ceased: and then she heard a sigh,
As if a lily syllabled sweet scent,--
Or was it but the wind that silverly
Touched some stringed instrument?
And then again a rumor she detected
Among the roses, words of musk and myrrh,
Saying, “He comes! the one she hath expected,
Who long hath sought for her.
The one whose coming made her soul awaken,
Whose face is fragrance and whose feet are fire:
The one by whom her being shall be shaken
With dreams and deep desire.”