Lyrics of Earth | Page 9

wall,
We forego the power to see,
The threads that bind
us to the All,
God or the Immensity;
Whereof on the eternal road

Man is but a passing mode.
Too blind we are, too little see
Of the magic pageantry,
Every
minute, every hour,
From the cloudflake to the flower,
Forever old,
forever strange,
Issuing in perpetual change
From the rainbow gates
of Time.
But he who through this common air
Surely knows the great and fair,

What is lovely, what sublime,
Becomes in an increasing span,

One with earth and one with man,
One, despite these mortal scars,

With the planets and the stars;

And Nature from her holy place,

Bending with unveilèd face,
Fills him in her divine employ
With
her own majestic joy.
Up the fielded slopes at morn,
Where light wefts of shadow pass,


Films upon the bending corn,
I shall sweep the purple grass.

Sun-crowned heights and mossy woods,
And the outer solitudes,

Mountain-valleys, dim with pine,
Shall be home and haunt of mine.

I shall search in crannied hollows,
Where the sunlight scarcely
follows,
And the secret forest brook
Murmurs, and from nook to
nook
Forever downward curls and cools,
Frothing in the bouldered
pools.
Many a noon shall find me laid
In the pungent balsam shade,

Where sharp breezes spring and shiver
On some deep rough-coasted
river,
And the plangent waters come,
Amber-hued and streaked
with foam;
Where beneath the sunburnt hills
All day long the
crowded mills
With remorseless champ and scream
Overlord the
sluicing stream,
And the rapids' iron roar
Hammers at the forest's
core;
Where corded rafts creep slowly on,
Glittering in the noonday
sun,
And the tawny river-dogs,
Shepherding the branded logs,

Bind and heave with cadenced cry;
Where the blackened tugs go by,

Panting hard and straining slow,
Laboring at the weighty tow,

Flat-nosed barges all in trim,
Creeping in long cumbrous line,

Loaded to the water's brim
With the clean, cool-scented pine.
Perhaps in some low meadow-land,
Stretching wide on either hand,

I shall see the belted bees
Rocking with the tricksy breeze
In the
spirèd meadow-sweet,
Or with eager trampling feet
Burrowing in
the boneset blooms,
Treading out the dry perfumes.
Where sun-hot
hay-fields newly mown
Climb the hillside ruddy brown,

I shall see
the haymakers,
While the noonday scarcely stirs,
Brown of neck
and booted gray,
Tossing up the rustling hay,
While the hay-racks
bend and rock,
As they take each scented cock,
Jolting over dip and
rise;
And the wavering butterflies
O'er the spaces brown and bare

Light and wander here and there.
I shall stray by many a stream,
Where the half-shut lilies gleam.

Napping out the sultry days
In the quiet secluded bays;
Where the

tasseled rushes tower,
O'er the purple pickerel-flower.
And the
floating dragon-fly--
Azure glint and crystal gleam--
Watches o'er
the burnished stream
With his eye of ebony;
Where the bull-frog
lolls at rest
On his float of lily-leaves,
That the swaying water
weaves,
And distends his yellow breast,
Lowing out from shore to
shore
With a hollow vibrant roar;
Where the softest wind that blows

As it lightly comes and goes,
O'er the jungled river meads,
Stirs a
whisper in the reeds,
And wakes the crowded bull-rushes
From
their stately reveries,
Flashing through their long-leaved hordes

Like a brandishing of swords;
There, too, the frost-like arrow-flowers

Tremble to the golden core,
Children of enchanted hours,
Whom
the rustling river bore
In the night's bewildered noon,
Woven of
water and the moon.
I shall hear the grasshoppers
From the parched grass rehearse,
And
with drowsy note prolong
Evermore the same thin song.
I shall hear
the crickets tell
Stories by the humming well,
And mark the locust,
with quaint eyes,
Caper in his cloak of gray
Like a jester in disguise

Rattling by the dusty way.
I shall dream by upland fences,
Where the season's wealth condenses

Over many a weedy wreck,
Wild, uncared-for, desert places,

That sovereign Beauty loves to deck
With her softest, dearest graces.

There the long year dreams in quiet,
And the summer's strength
runs riot.
Shall I not remember these,

Deep in winter reveries?

Berried brier and thistle-bloom,
And milkweed with its dense
perfume;
Slender vervain towering up
In a many-branchèd cup,

Like a candlestick, each spire
Kindled with a violet fire;
Matted
creepers and wild cherries,
Purple-bunchèd elderberries,
And on
scanty plots of sod
Groves of branchy goldenrod.
What though autumn mornings now,
Winterward with glittering brow,

Stiffen in the silver grass;
And what though robins flock and pass,

With subdued and sober call,
To the old year's funeral;
Though

October's crimson leaves
Rustle at the gusty door,
And the tempest
round the eaves
Alternate with pipe and roar;
I sit, as erst,
unharmed, secure,
Conscious that my store is sure,
Whatsoe'er the
fencèd fields,
Or the untilled forest yields
Of unhurt remembrances,

Or thoughts, far-glimpsed, half-followed, these
I have reaped and
laid away,
A treasure of unwinnowed grain,
To the garner packed
and gray
Gathered without toil or strain.
And when the darker days shall come,
And the fields are white and
dumb;
When our fires are half in vain,
And the crystal starlight
weaves
Mockeries of summer leaves,
Pictured on the icy pane;

When the high aurora gleams
Far above the Arctic streams
Like a
line of shifting spears,
And the broad pine-circled meres,

Glimmering in that spectral light,
Thunder through the northern night;

Then within the bolted door
I shall con my summer store;

Though the fences scarcely show
Black above the drifted snow,

Though the icy sweeping wind
Whistle in the empty tree,
Safe
within the sheltered mind,
I shall feed on memory.
Yet across the windy night
Comes upon its wings a cry;
Fashioned
forms and modes take flight,
And a vision sad and high
Of the
laboring world down there,
Where the lights burn