Poems of Nature, part 2, Mountain Pictures etc | Page 7

beauty overbroods?These fair and faint similitudes;?Yet not unblest is he who sees?Shadows of God's realities,?And knows beyond this masquerade?Of shape and color, light and shade,?And dawn and set, and wax and wane,?Eternal verities remain.
O gems of sapphire, granite set!?O hills that charmed horizons fret?I know how fair your morns can break,?In rosy light on isle and lake;?How over wooded slopes can run?The noonday play of cloud and sun,?And evening droop her oriflamme?Of gold and red in still Asquam.
The summer moons may round again,?And careless feet these hills profane;?These sunsets waste on vacant eyes?The lavish splendor of the skies;?Fashion and folly, misplaced here,?Sigh for their natural atmosphere,?And travelled pride the outlook scorn?Of lesser heights than Matterhorn.
But let me dream that hill and sky?Of unseen beauty prophesy;?And in these tinted lakes behold?The trailing of the raiment fold?Of that which, still eluding gaze,?Allures to upward-tending ways,?Whose footprints make, wherever found,?Our common earth a holy ground.?1883.
SWEET FERN.
The subtle power in perfume found?Nor priest nor sibyl vainly learned;?On Grecian shrine or Aztec mound?No censer idly burned.
That power the old-time worships knew,?The Corybantes' frenzied dance,?The Pythian priestess swooning through?The wonderland of trance.
And Nature holds, in wood and field,?Her thousand sunlit censers still;?To spells of flower and shrub we yield?Against or with our will.
I climbed a hill path strange and new?With slow feet, pausing at each turn;?A sudden waft of west wind blew?The breath of the sweet fern.
That fragrance from my vision swept?The alien landscape; in its stead,?Up fairer hills of youth I stepped,?As light of heart as tread.
I saw my boyhood's lakelet shine?Once more through rifts of woodland shade;?I knew my river's winding line?By morning mist betrayed.
With me June's freshness, lapsing brook,?Murmurs of leaf and bee, the call?Of birds, and one in voice and look?In keeping with them all.
A fern beside the way we went?She plucked, and, smiling, held it up,?While from her hand the wild, sweet scent?I drank as from a cup.
O potent witchery of smell!?The dust-dry leaves to life return,?And she who plucked them owns the spell?And lifts her ghostly fern.
Or sense or spirit? Who shall say?What touch the chord of memory thrills??It passed, and left the August day?Ablaze on lonely hills.
THE WOOD GIANT
From Alton Bay to Sandwich Dome,?From Mad to Saco river,?For patriarchs of the primal wood?We sought with vain endeavor.
And then we said: "The giants old?Are lost beyond retrieval;?This pygmy growth the axe has spared?Is not the wood primeval.
"Look where we will o'er vale and hill,?How idle are our searches?For broad-girthed maples, wide-limbed oaks,?Centennial pines and birches.
"Their tortured limbs the axe and saw?Have changed to beams and trestles;?They rest in walls, they float on seas,?They rot in sunken vessels.
"This shorn and wasted mountain land?Of underbrush and boulder,--?Who thinks to see its full-grown tree?Must live a century older."
At last to us a woodland path,?To open sunset leading,?Revealed the Anakim of pines?Our wildest wish exceeding.
Alone, the level sun before;?Below, the lake's green islands;?Beyond, in misty distance dim,?The rugged Northern Highlands.
Dark Titan on his Sunset Hill?Of time and change defiant?How dwarfed the common woodland seemed,?Before the old-time giant!
What marvel that, in simpler days?Of the world's early childhood,?Men crowned with garlands, gifts, and praise?Such monarchs of the wild-wood?
That Tyrian maids with flower and song?Danced through the hill grove's spaces,?And hoary-bearded Druids found?In woods their holy places?
With somewhat of that Pagan awe?With Christian reverence blending,?We saw our pine-tree's mighty arms?Above our heads extending.
We heard his needles' mystic rune,?Now rising, and now dying,?As erst Dodona's priestess heard?The oak leaves prophesying.
Was it the half-unconscious moan?Of one apart and mateless,?The weariness of unshared power,?The loneliness of greatness?
O dawns and sunsets, lend to him?Your beauty and your wonder!?Blithe sparrow, sing thy summer song?His solemn shadow under!
Play lightly on his slender keys,?O wind of summer, waking?For hills like these the sound of seas?On far-off beaches breaking,
And let the eagle and the crow?Find shelter in his branches,?When winds shake down his winter snow?In silver avalanches.
The brave are braver for their cheer,?The strongest need assurance,?The sigh of longing makes not less?The lesson of endurance.?1885.
A DAY.?Talk not of sad November, when a day?Of warm, glad sunshine fills the sky of noon,?And a wind, borrowed from some morn of June,?Stirs the brown grasses and the leafless spray.
On the unfrosted pool the pillared pines?Lay their long shafts of shadow: the small rill,?Singing a pleasant song of summer still,?A line of silver, down the hill-slope shines.
Hushed the bird-voices and the hum of bees,?In the thin grass the crickets pipe no more;?But still the squirrel hoards his winter store,?And drops his nut-shells from the shag-bark trees.
Softly the dark green hemlocks whisper: high?Above, the spires of yellowing larches show,?Where the woodpecker and home-loving crow?And jay and nut-hatch winter's threat defy.
O gracious beauty, ever new and old!?O sights and sounds of nature, doubly dear?When the low sunshine warns the closing year?Of snow-blown fields and waves of Arctic cold!
Close to my heart