Chapter IV

Then fain am I to sing and sing,
And then again to fly and fly,
Beyond the flight of cloud or wing,
Far under azure arcs of sky;
My love at her chaste feet to fling,
Behold her face and--die.

A DREAMER OF DREAMS

He lived beyond men, and so stood
Admitted to the brotherhood
Of beauty; dreams, with which he trod
Companioned as some sylvan god.
And oft men wondered, when his thought
Made all their knowledge seem as naught,
If he, like Uther's mystic son,
Had not been born for Avalon.

When wandering 'mid the whispering trees,
His soul communed with every breeze;
Heard voices calling from the glades,
Bloom-words of the Leimoniads;
Or Dryads of the ash and oak,
Who syllabled his name and spoke
With him of presences and powers
That glimpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers.

By every violet-hallowed brook,
Where every bramble-matted nook
Rippled and laughed with water sounds,
He walked like one on sainted grounds,
Fearing intrusion on the spell
That kept some fountain-spirit's well,
Or woodland genius, sitting where
Red, racy berries kissed his hair.

Once when the wind, far o'er the hill,
Had fall'n and left the wildwood still
For Dawn's dim feet to glide across,--
Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss,
The air around him golden ripe
With daybreak,--there, with oaten pipe,
His eyes beheld the wood-god, Pan,
Goat-bearded, and half-brute, half-man;
Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhyme
Blew in his reed to rudest time;
And swollen-jowled, with rolling eye--
Beneath the slowly silvering sky,
Whose light shone through the forest's roof--
Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoof
The branch was snapped, and, interfused
Between great roots, the moss was bruised.

And often when he wandered through
Old forests at the fall of dew--
A new Endymion who sought
A beauty higher than all thought--
Some night, men said, most surely he
Would favored be of deity:
That in the holy solitude
Her sudden presence, long pursued,
Unto his gaze would be confessed;
The awful moonlight of her breast
Come, high with majesty, and hold
His heart's blood till his heart were cold,
Unpulsed, unsinewed, and undone,
And snatch his soul to Avalon.

PAN

I

Haunter of green intricácies
Where the sunlight's amber laces
Deeps of darkest violet;
Where the shaggy Satyr chases
Nymphs and Dryads, fair as Graces,
Whose white limbs with dew are wet:
Piper in hid mountain places,
Where the blue-eyed Oread braces
Winds which in her sweet cheeks set
Of Aurora rosy traces;
While the Faun from myrtle mazes
Watches with an eye of jet:
What art thou and these dim races,
Thou, O Pan, of many faces,
Who art ruler yet?

II

Tell me, piper, have I ever
Heard thy hollow syrinx quiver
Trickling music in the trees?
Where the hazel copses shiver,
Have I heard its dronings sever
The warm silence, or the bees?
Ripple murmurings that never
Could be born of fall or river,
Or the whispering breeze.

III

Once in tempest it was given
Me to see thee,--where the leven
Lit the craggy wood with glare,--
Dancing, while,--like wedges driven,--
Thunder split the deeps of heaven,
And the wild rain swept thy hair.--
What art thou, whose presence, even
While with fear my heart was riven,
Healed it as with prayer?

A STORMY SUNSET

I

Soul of my body! what a death
For such a day of grief and gloom,
Unbroken sorrow of the sky!--
'Tis as if God's own loving breath
Had swept the piled-up thunder by,
And, bursting through the tempest's sheath,
Cleft from its pod a giant bloom.