Lyrics of Earth | Page 3

busy
sparrow, primed with glee,
First preacher in the naked wilderness,
Piping an end to all the long
distress
From every fence and every leafless tree.
Now with soft slight and viewless artifice
Winter's iron work is wondrously undone;
In all the little hollows
cored with ice
The clear brown pools stand simmering in the sun,
Frail lucid worlds,
upon whose tremulous floors
All day the wandering water-bugs at will,
Shy mariners whose oars
are never still,
Voyage and dream about the heightening shores.

The bluebird, peeping from the gnarlèd thorn,
Prattles upon his frolic flute, or flings,
In bounding flight across the
golden morn,
An azure gleam from off his splendid wings.
Here the slim-pinioned
swallows sweep and pass
Down to the far-off river; the black crow
With wise and wary visage
to and fro
Settles and stalks about the withered grass.
Here, when the murmurous May-day is half gone,
The watchful lark before my feet takes flight,
And wheeling to some
lonelier field far on,
Drops with obstreperous cry; and here at night,
When the first star
precedes the great red moon,
The shore-lark tinkles from the darkening field,
Somewhere, we
know not, in the dusk concealed,
His little creakling and continuous
tune.
Here, too, the robins, lusty as of old,
Hunt the waste grass for forage, or prolong
From every quarter of
these fields the bold,
Blithe phrases of their never-finished song.
The white-throat's distant
descant with slow stress
Note after note upon the noonday falls,
Filling the leisured air at
intervals
With his own mood of piercing pensiveness.
How often from this windy upland perch,
Mine eyes have seen the forest break in bloom,
The rose-red maple

and the golden birch,
The dusty yellow of the elms, the gloom
Of the tall poplar hung with
tasseled black;
Ah, I have watched, till eye and ear and brain
Grew full of dreams as
they, the moted plain,
The sun-steeped wood, the marsh-land at its
back,
The valley where the river wheels and fills,
Yon city glimmering in its smoky shroud,
And out at the last misty
rim the hills
Blue and far off and mounded like a cloud,
And here the noisy rutted
road that goes
Down the slope yonder, flanked on either side
With the
smooth-furrowed fields flung black and wide, Patched with pale water
sleeping in the rows.
So as I watched the crowded leaves expand,
The bloom break sheath, the summer's strength uprear, In earth's great
mother's heart already planned
The heaped and burgeoned plenty of the year,
Even as she from out
her wintry cell
My spirit also sprang to life anew,
And day by day as the spring's
bounty grew,
Its conquering joy possessed me like a spell.
In reverie by day and midnight dream
I sought these upland fields and walked apart,
Musing on Nature, till
my thought did seem

To read the very secrets of her heart;
In mooded moments earnest and
sublime
I stored the themes of many a future song,
Whose substance should
be Nature's, clear and strong, Bound in a casket of majestic rhyme.
Brave bud-like plans that never reached the fruit,
Like hers our mother's who with every hour,
Easily replenished from
the sleepless root,
Covers her bosom with fresh bud and flower;
Yet I was happy as
young lovers be,
Who in the season of their passion's birth
Deem that they have their
utmost worship's worth,
If love be near them, just to hear and see.
IN MAY
Grief was my master yesternight;
To-morrow I may grieve again;
But now along the windy plain
The
clouds have taken flight.
The sowers in the furrows go;
The lusty river brimmeth on;
The curtains from the hills are gone;

The leaves are out; and lo,
The silvery distance of the day,
The light horizons, and between
The glory of the perfect green,
The
tumult of the May.
The bobolinks at noonday sing
More softly than the softest flute,
And lightlier than the lightest lute


Their fairy tambours ring.
The roads far off are towered with dust;
The cherry-blooms are swept and thinned;
In yonder swaying elms
the wind
Is charging gust on gust.
But here there is no stir at all;
The ministers of sun and shadow
Horde all the perfumes of the
meadow
Behind a grassy wall.
An infant rivulet wind-free
Adown the guarded hollow sets,
Over whose brink the violets
Are
nodding peacefully.
From pool to pool it prattles by;
The flashing swallows dip and pass,
Above the tufted marish grass,

And here at rest am I.
I care not for the old distress,
Nor if to-morrow bid me moan;
To-day is mine, and I have known

An hour of blessedness.
LIFE AND NATURE
I passed through the gates of the city,
The streets were strange and
still,
Through the doors of the open churches
The organs were
moaning shrill.
Through the doors and the great high windows
I heard the murmur of
prayer,
And the sound of their solemn singing
Streamed out on the
sunlit air;

A sound of some great burden
That lay on the world's dark breast,

Of the old, and the sick, and the lonely,
And the