Chapter X: Echo

Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
Her only life the noises that she mocks.

THE DREAMER

Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers,
And mark the loafing sunlight’s lazy laugh;
Or, on each season, spell the epitaph
Of its dead months repeated in their flowers;
Or list the music of the strolling showers,
Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff,
Or read the day’s delivered monograph
Through all the chapters of its dædal hours.
Still with the same child-faith and child regard
He looks on Nature, hearing, at her heart,
The Beautiful beat out the time and place,
Through which no lesson of this life is hard,
No struggle vain of science or of art,
That dies with failure written on its face.

WINTER

The flute, whence Summer’s dreamy finger-tips
Drew music,--ripening the cramped kernels in
The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,
Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,--
Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips,
And surly songs whistle around his chin;
Now the wild days and wilder nights begin
When, at the eaves, the lengthening icicle drips.
Thy songs, O Summer, are not lost so soon!
Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,
Which unto Winter’s masculine airs doth give
Thy own creative qualities of tune,
Through which we see each bough bend white with fruit,
Each branch with bloom, in snow commemorative.

MID-WINTER

All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold;
And through the snow the muffled waters fell;
The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell,
Like some old hermit whose last bead is told.
At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled
Aside to leave the fierce sky visible;
Harsh as an iron landscape of wan Hell
The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold.
And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at
My window, wailing: now a little child
Crying outside my door; and now the long
Howl of some starved beast down the flue.--I sat
And knew ’twas Winter with his madman song
Of miseries on which he stared and smiled.

SPRING

First came the rain, loud, with sonorous lips;
A pursuivant who heralded a prince:
And dawn put on her livery of tints,
And dusk bound gold about her hair and hips:
And, all in silver mail, the sunlight came,
A knight, who bade the winter let him pass;
And freed imprisoned beauty, naked as
The Court of Love, in all her wildflower shame.
And so she came, in breeze-borne loveliness,
Across the hills; and heav’n bent down to bless:
Above her head the birds were as a choir;
And at her feet, like some strong worshiper,
The shouting water pæan’d praise of her,
Who, with blue eyes, set the wild world on fire.

TRANSFORMATION

It is the time when, by the forest falls,
The touch-me-nots hang faery folly-caps;
When ferns and flowers fill the lichened laps
Of rocks with color, rich as orient shawls:
And in my heart I hear a voice that calls
Me woodward, where the hamadryad wraps
Her limbs in bark, and, bubbling in the saps,
Sings the sweet Greek of Pan’s old madrigals:
There is a gleam that lures me up the stream--
A Naiad swimming with wet limbs of light?
Perfume that leads me on from dream to dream--
An oread’s footprints flowering into flight?
And, lo! meseems I am a Faun again,
One with the myths that I pursue in vain.

RESPONSE

There is a music of immaculate love,
That beats within the virginal veins of Spring,--
And trillium blossoms, (like the stars that cling
To fairies’ wands;) and, strung on sprays above,
White-hearts and mandrake blooms, (that look enough
Like the elves’ washing--white with laundering
Of May-moon dews;) and all pale-opening
Wildflowers of the woods are born thereof.
There is no sod Spring’s white foot brushes but
Must feel the music that vibrates within,
And thrill to the communicated touch
Responsive harmonies, that must unshut
The heart of Beauty for Song’s concrete kin,
Emotions--that are flowers--born of such.

THE SWASHBUCKLER

Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port;
A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts,
All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort
Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts
A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands
In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that
Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands,
He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat.
Aggression marches armies in his words;
And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-à-pie;
His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords;
And in his carriage camp all wars to be:--
With him, of battles there shall be no lack
While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack.

SIMULACRA

Dark in the west the sunset’s sombre wrack
Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,
Along whose battlements the battle lit
Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,
A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,
Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit
With Conflagration glaring at each crack.--
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
Our dreams as real as our waking seems
With recollections time can not destroy,
So in the mind of Nature now awakes,
Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams
The stormy story of the fall of Troy.

THE BLUEBIRD

From morn till noon upon the window-pane
The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails,
And all the afternoon the blustering gales
Beat at the door with furious feet of rain.
The rose, near which the lily’s bloom lay slain,
Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails,
On which the sullen slug left silvery trails--
It seemed the sun would never shine again.
Then in the drench, long, loud, and clarion-clear,--
A skyey herald tabarded in blue,--
A bluebird warbled ... and at once a bow
Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear
God’s sapphire spaces crystallizing through
The strata’d clouds in azure tremolo.

CAVERNS

_Written of Colossal Cave, Kentucky._

Aisles and abysses; leagues, no man explores,
Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
Of adamant, o’er earthquake-builded floors.
Where forms, such as the Dæmon-World adores,
Laborious water carves; whence echo slips
Wild-tongued o’er pools where petrifaction strips
Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.--
Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits,
Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth,
I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,--
Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits,
’Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,--
An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell.

A VOICE ON THE WIND

PROEM

_Oh, for a soul that fulfills
Music like that of a bird!
Thrilling with rapture the hills,
Heedless if any one heard._

_Or, like the flower that blooms
Lone in the midst of the trees,
Filling the woods with perfumes,
Careless if any one sees._

_Or, like the wandering wind,
Over the meadows that swings,
Bringing wild sweets to mankind,
Knowing not that which it brings._

_Oh, for a way to impart
Beauty, no matter how hard!
Like unto Nature, whose art
Never once dreams of reward._

A VOICE ON THE WIND

I

She walks with the wind on the windy height
When the rocks are loud and the waves are white,
And all night long she calls through the night,
“O my children, come home!”
Her bleak gown, torn as a tattered cloud,
Tosses around her like a shroud,
While over the deep her voice rings loud,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”

II

Who is she who wanders alone,
When the wind drives sheer and the rain is blown?
Who walks all night and makes her moan,
“O my children, come home!”
Whose face is raised to the blinding gale;
Whose hair blows black and whose eyes are pale,
While over the world goes by her wail,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”

III

She walks with the wind in the windy wood;
The dark rain drips from her hair and hood,
And her cry sobs by, like a ghost pursued,
“O my children, come home!”
Where the trees loom gaunt and the rocks stretch drear,
The owl and the fox crouch back in fear,
As wild through the wood her voice they hear,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”

IV

Who is she who shudders by
When the boughs blow bare and the dead leaves fly?
Who walks all night with her wailing cry,
“O my children, come home!”
Who, strange of look, and wild of tongue,
With wan feet wounded and hands wild-wrung,
Sweeps on and on with her cry, far-flung,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”