Chapter II: Epilogue: 482

FIRST QUARTER, THE 471

GOD’S GREEN BOOK 441

GRAY NOVEMBER 456

HUSHED HOUSE, THE 465

IN AGES PAST 479

IN THE BEECH WOODS 434

JONGLEUR, THE 477

LATE OCTOBER WOODS 432

LOST GARDEN, THE 429

MISER, THE 480

NIGHT-WIND, THE 438

OLD SIR JOHN 478

ON THE HILLTOP 475

ROSE’S SECRET, THE 463

SUNSET ON THE RIVER 446

TABERNACLES 448

UNFORGOTTEN 467

UNSUCCESS 468

UNTO WHAT END 481

WANING YEAR, THE 454

WET DAY, A 443

WHAT OF IT THEN 458

WILLOW WATER, THE 423

WOMANHOOD 461

WORD IN THE WOOD, THE 436

ZERO 474

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HERE IN PAST TIME HE KISSED HER HAIR (See page 63) _Frontispiece_

PAGE

EGYPT 262

MAKING IT CHUCKLE AND SING AND SPEAK 328

TO GERTRUDE

_You are weary of reading:
I am weary of song:
The one is misleading;
The other, o’er long:--
All Art’s overlong._

_Ah, would it were ours
To leave them, and then,
’Mid the fields and the flowers,
Be children again,
Glad children again._

INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL

_A thought, to lift me up to those
Sweet wildflowers of the pensive woods;
The lofty, lowly attitudes
Of bluet and of bramble-rose:
To lift me where my mind may reach
The lessons which their beauties teach._

_A dream, to lead my spirit on
With sounds of fairy shawms and flutes,
And all mysterious attributes
Of skies of dusk and skies of dawn:
To lead me, like the wandering brooks,
Past all the knowledge of the books._

_A song, to make my heart a guest
Of happiness whose soul is love;
One with the life that knoweth of
But song that turneth toil to rest:
To make me cousin to the birds,
Whose music needs not wisdom’s words._

I

Shall I forget, and yet behold
How Earth hath said its secret,--to
The violet’s appealing blue,--
Of fragrance; old as Earth is old,
The knowledge that is never told?

Shall I behold and yet forget,
The soft blue of the heaven fell,
Between the dusk and dawn, to tell
Its purpose, to the violet,
Of beauty none hath fathomed yet?

Between the Earth and Heav’n, above,
The wind goes singing all day long;
And he who listens to its song
May catch an instant’s meaning of
The end of life, the end of love.

II

The gods of Greece are mine once more!
The old philosophies again!
For I have drunk the hellebore
Of dreams, and dreams have made me sane--
The wine of dreams! that doth unfold
My other self,--’mid shadowy shrines
Of myths which marble held of old,
Part of the Age of Bronze or Gold,--
That lives, a pagan, ’mid the pines.

Dead myths, to whom such dreams belong!
O beautiful philosophies
Of Nature! crystallized in song
And marble, peopling lost seas,
Lost forests and the star-lost vast,
Grant me the childlike faith that clung.--
Through loveliness that could not last,--
To Heaven in the pagan past,
Calling for God with infant tongue!

III

Idea, god of Plato! one
With beauty, justice, truth and love:
Who, type by type, the world begun
From an ideal world above!
Reason, who into Nature wrought
Your real entities,--which are
Ideas,--giving to our star
Their beauty through reflected thought;

The reminiscences that flame,
Momental, through the mind of man,
Of things his memory can not name,
Lost things his knowledge can not scan,--
Hints of past periods are not these,
His soul hath lived since it had birth
In God?--Yea! who shall say that Earth
More ancient is than he who sees?

IV

Beside us, and yet far above,
She leads us to no base renown--
The Ideal, with her sun-white crown,
And starry raiment of her love:
She leads us by ascending ways
Of Nature to her purposed ends,
Who in the difficult, dark days
Of trial with her smile defends.

Beyond the years, that blindly grope,
To climb with her, from year to year,
To some exalted atmosphere,
Were more than earthly joy or hope!
Though in that atmosphere we find
Not her--her influence, pointing to
New elevations of the mind
By some superior avenue.

V

The climbing-cricket in the dusk
Moves wings of moony gossamer;
Its vague, vibrating note I hear
Among the boughs of dew and musk,
Whence, rustling with a mellow thud,
The ripe quince falls. Low, deep and clear,
The west is bound with burning blood.

The slanting bats beneath the moon,--
A dark disk edge with glittering white,--
Spin loops of intertangled night:
An owl wakes, hooting over soon,
Within the forest far away:
And now the heav’n fills, light by light,
And all the blood-red west grows gray.

I hear no sound of wind or wave;
No sob or song, except the slow
Leaf-cricket’s flute-soft tremolo,
Among wet walks grown gray and grave.--
In raiment mists of silver sear,
With strange, pale eyes thou comest, O
Thou Spirit of the Waning-Year!

VI

The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.

The streams are full of oracles,
And momentary whisperings;
An immaterial beauty swells
Its breezy silver o’er the shells
With wordless speech that sings and sings
The real life of unreal things.

No indeterminable thought is theirs,
The stars’, the sunsets’ and the flowers’;
Whose inexpressible speech declares
Th’ immortal Beautiful, who shares
This mortal riddle which is ours,
Beyond the forward-flying hours.