Chapter IV

Such is the music of his sleeping hours.
Day hath another--’tis a melody
He trips to, made by the assembled flowers,
And light and fragrance laughing ’mid the bowers,
And ripeness busy with the acorn-tree.
Such strains, perhaps, as filled with mute amaze--
The silent music of Earth’s ecstasy--
The Satyr’s soul, the Faun of classic days.

THE WILD IRIS

That day we wandered ’mid the hills,--so lone
Clouds are not lonelier,--the forest lay
In emerald darkness round us. Many a stone
And gnarly root, gray-mossed, made wild our way:
And many a bird the glimmering light along
Showered the golden bubbles of its song.

Then in the valley, where the brook went by,
Silvering the ledges that it rippled from,--
An isolated slip of fallen sky,
Epitomizing heaven in its sum,--
An iris bloomed--blue, as if, flower-disguised,
The gaze of Spring had there materialized.

I have forgotten many things since then--
Much beauty and much happiness and grief;
And toiled and dreamed among my fellow-men,
Rejoicing in the knowledge life is brief.
“’Tis winter now,” so says each barren bough;
And face and hair proclaim ’tis winter now.

I would forget the gladness of that spring!
I would forget that day when she and I,
Between the bird-song and the blossoming,
Went hand in hand beneath the soft spring sky!--
Much is forgotten, yea--and yet, and yet,
The things we would we never can forget.--

Nor I how May then minted treasuries
Of crowfoot gold; and molded out of light
The sorrel’s cups, whose elfin chalices
Of limpid spar were streaked with rosy white.
Nor all the stars of twinkling spiderwort,
And mandrake moons with which her brows were girt.

But most of all, yea, it were well for me,
Me and my heart, that I forget that flower,
The blue wild-iris, azure fleur-de-lis,
That she and I together found that hour.
Its recollection can but emphasize
The pain of loss, remindful of her eyes.

THE PATH BY THE CREEK

There is a path that leads
Through purple ironweeds,
By button-bush and mallow
Along a creek;
A path that wildflowers hallow,
That wild-birds seek;
Roofed thick with eglantine
And grape and trumpet-vine.

This side, the blackberries sweet
Glow cobalt in the heat;
That side, a creamy yellow,
In summer-time
The pawpaws slowly mellow:
And autumn’s prime
Strews red the Chickasaw,
Persimmon brown and haw.

The glittering dragon-fly,
A wingéd gem, goes by;
And tawny wasp and hornet
Make drowsy drone;
The beetle, like a garnet,
Basks on the stone;
And butterflies float there,
Spangling with gold the air.

Here the brown thrashers hide,
And chat and cat-bird chide;
The blue kingfisher houses
Above the stream,
And here the heron drowses,
Lost in his dream;
The vireo’s flitting note
Makes woodlands more remote.

And now a cow’s slow bell
Tinkles from dale to dell;
Where breeze-dropped petals winnow
From blossomy limbs
On waters, where the minnow,
Faint-twinkling, swims;
Where, in the root-arched shade,
Slim prisms of light are laid.

When in the tangled thorn
The new-moon hangs a horn,
Or, ’mid the sunset’s islands,
Guides her canoe,
The brown owl in the silence
Calls, and the dew
Beads glimmering orbs of damp,
Each one a glow-worm lamp.

Then when the night is still
Here sings the whippoorwill;
And stealthy sounds of crickets,
And winds that pass,
Whispering, through bramble thickets
Along the grass,
Faint with warm scents of hay,
Seem feet of dreams astray.

And where the water shines
Dark through tree-twisted vines,
Some water-spirit, dreaming,
Braids in her hair
A star’s reflection; seeming
A jewel there;
While all the sweet night long
Ripples her quiet song....

Would I could imitate,
O path, thy happy state!
Making my life all beauty,
All bloom and beam;
Knowing no other duty
But just to dream,
And far from pain and woe
Lead feet that come and go.

Leading to calm content,
O’er ways the Master went,
Through lowly things and humble,
To peace and love;
Teaching the lives that stumble
To look above,
Forget the world of toil
And all its mad turmoil.

ALONG THE STREAM

Where the violet shadows brood
Under cottonwoods and beeches,
Through whose leaves the restless reaches
Of the river glance, I’ve stood,
While the red-bird and the thrush
Set to song the morning hush.

There,--when wakening woods encroach
On the shadowy winding waters,
And the bluets, April’s daughters,
At the darling Spring’s approach,
Star their myriads through the trees,--
All the land is one with peace.

Under some imposing cliff,
That, with bush and tree and boulder,
Thrusts a gray, gigantic shoulder
O’er the stream, I’ve oared a skiff,
While great clouds of iceberg hue
Lounged along the noonday blue.

There,--when harvest heights impend
Over shores of rippling summer,
And to greet the fair new-comer,--
June,--the wildrose thickets bend
In a million blossoms dressed,--
All the land is one with rest.

On some rock, where gaunt the oak
Reddens and the sombre cedar
Darkens, like a sachem leader,
I have lain and watched the smoke
Of the steamboat, far-away,
Trailed along the dying day.

There,--when margin waves reflect
Autumn colors, gay and sober,
And the Indian-girl, October,
Wampum-like in berries decked,
Leans above the leaf-strewn streams,--
All the land is one with dreams.

Through the bottoms where,--out-tossed
By the wind’s wild hands,--ashiver
Bend the willows o’er the river,
I have walked in sleet and frost,
While beneath the cold round moon,
Frozen, gleamed the long lagoon.

There,--when leafless woods uplift
Spectral arms the storm-blasts splinter,
And the hoary trapper, Winter,
Builds his camp of ice and drift,
With his snow-pelts furred and shod,--
All the land is one with God.

VOICES

When blood-root blooms and trillium flowers
Unclasp their stars to sun and rain,
My heart strikes hands with winds and showers
And wanders in the woods again.

O urging impulse, born of spring!
That makes glad April of my soul,
No bird, however wild of wing,
Is more impatient of control.

Impetuous of pulse it beats
Within my blood and bears me hence;
Above the housetops and the streets
I hear its happy eloquence.

It tells me all that I would know,
Of birds and buds, of blooms and bees;
I seem to hear the blossoms blow,
And leaves unfolding on the trees.

I seem to hear the bluebells ring
Faint purple peals of perfume; and
The honey-throated poppies fling
Their golden laughter o’er the land.

It calls to me; it sings to me;
I hear its far voice night and day;
I can not choose but go when tree
And flower clamor, “Come away!”

THE ROAD HOME

Over the hills as the pewee flies,
Under the blue of the southern skies;
Over the hills where the red-bird wings,
Like a scarlet blossom, or sits and sings;

Under the shadow of rock and tree,
Where the warm wind drones with the honeybee;
And the tall wild-carrots around you sway
Their lace-like flowers of cloudy gray:

By the black-cohosh and its pearl-white plume
A-nod in the woodland’s odorous gloom;
By the old rail-fence, in the elder’s shade,
That the myriad hosts of the weeds invade:

Where the butterfly-weed, like a coal of fire,
Blurs orange-red through brush and brier;
Where the pennyroyal and mint smell sweet,
And blackberries tangle the humming heat,
The old road leads; then crosses the creek,
Where the minnow dartles, a silvery streak;
Where the cows wade deep through the blue-eyed grass,
And the flickering dragon-flies gleaming pass.

That road is easy, however long,
Which wends with beauty as toil with song;
And the road we follow shall lead us straight
Past creek and wood to a farm-house gate.

Past hill and hollow, whence scents are blown
Of dew-wet clover that scythes have mown;
To a house that stands with porches wide
And gray low roof on the green hill-side.

Colonial, stately; ’mid shade and shine
Of the locust tree and the southern pine;
With its orchard acres and meadowlands
Stretched out before it like welcoming hands.

And gardens, where, in the myrrh-sweet June,
Magnolias blossom with many a moon
Of fragrance; and, in the feldspar light
Of August, roses bloom red and white.

In a woodbine arbor, a perfumed place,
A slim girl sits with listening face;
Her bonnet by her, a sunbeam lies
On her lovely hair, in her earnest eyes.

Her eyes, as blue as the distant deeps
Of the heavens above where the high hawk sleeps;
A book beside her, wherein she read
Till she saw _him_ coming, she heard _his_ tread.

Come home at last; come back from the war;
In his eyes a smile, on his brow a scar:
To the South come back--who wakes from her dream
To the love and the peace of a new regime.

DROUTH

I

The hot sunflowers by the glaring pike
Lift shields of sultry brass; the teasel tops,
Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike
Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse
Are sick with summer: now, with breathless stops,
The locusts cymbal; now grasshoppers beat
Their castanets: and rolled in dust, a team,--
Like some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream,--
An empty wagon rattles through the heat.

II

Where now the blue, blue flags? the flow’rs whose mouths
Are moist and musky? Where the sweet-breathed mint,
That made the brook-bank herby? Where the South’s
Wild morning-glories, rich in hues, that hint
At coming showers that the rainbows tint?
Where all the blossoms that the wildwood knows?
The frail oxalis hidden in its leaves;
The Indian-pipe, pale as a soul that grieves;
The freckled touch-me-not and forest rose.

III

Dead! dead! all dead beside the drouth-burnt brook,
Shrouded in moss or in the shriveled grass.
Where waved their bells,--from which the wild-bee shook
The dew-drop once,--gaunt, in a nightmare mass,
The rank weeds crowd; through which the cattle pass,
Thirsty and lean, seeking some meagre spring,
Closed in with thorns, on which stray bits of wool
The panting sheep have left, that sought the cool,
From morn till evening wearily wandering.