Shapes and Shadows

Excerpt

The Evanescent Beautiful.

Day after Day, young with eternal beauty,
Pays flowery duty to the month and clime;
Night after night erects a vasty portal
Of stars immortal for the march of Time.
But where are now the Glory and the Rapture,
That once did capture me in cloud and stream?
Where now the Joy that was both speech and silence?
Where the beguilance that was fact and dream?
I know that Earth and Heaven are as golden
As they of olden made me feel and see;
Not in themselves is lacking aught of power
Through star and flower—something's lost in me.
Return! Return!I cry,O Visions vanished,
O Voices banished, to my Soul again!—
The near Earth blossoms and the far Skies glisten,
I look and listen, but, alas! in vain.

I

Clad on with glowing beauty and the peace,
Benign, of calm maturity, she stands
Among her meadows and her orchard-lands,
And on her mellowing gardens and her trees,
Out of the ripe abundance of her hands,
Bestows increase
And fruitfulness, as, wrapped in sunny ease,
Blue-eyed and blonde she goes,
Upon her bosomSummer'srichest rose.
And he who follows where her footsteps lead,
By hill and rock, by forest-side and stream,
Shall glimpse the glory of her visible dream,
In flower and fruit, in rounded nut and seed:
She in whose path the very shadows gleam;
Whose humblest weed
Seems lovelier thanJune'sloveliest flower, indeed,
And sweeter to the smell
ThanApril'sself within a rainy dell.

III

Hers is a sumptuous simplicity
Within the fair Republic of her flowers,
Where you may see her standing hours on hours,
Breast-deep in gold, soft-holding up a bee
To her hushed ear; or sitting under bowers
Of greenery,
A butterfly a-tilt upon her knee;
Or, lounging on her hip,
Dancing a cricket on her finger-tip.
Aye, let me breathe hot scents that tell of you:
The hoary catnip and the meadow-mint,
On which the honour of your touch doth print
Itself as odour. Let me drink the hue
Of ironweed and mist-flow'r here that hint,
With purple and blue,
The rapture that your presence doth imbue
Their inmost essence with,
Immortal though as transient as a myth.

V

Yea, let me feed on sounds that still assure
Me where you hide: the brooks', whose happy din
Tells where, the deep retired woods within,
Disrobed, you bathe; the birds', whose drowsy lure
Tells where you slumber, your warm-nestling chin
Soft on the pure
Pink cushion of your palm ... What better cure
For care and memory's ache
Than to behold you so and watch you wake!

The Higher Brotherhood.

To come in touch with mysteries
Of beauty idealizing Earth,
Go seek the hills, grown old with trees,
The old hills wise with death and birth.
There you may hear the heart that beats
In streams, where music has its source;
And in wild rocks of green retreats
Behold the silent soul of force.
Above the love that emanates
From human passion, and reflects
The flesh, must be the love that waits
On Nature, whose high call elects
None to her secrets save the few
Who hold that facts are far less real
Than dreams, with which all facts indue
Themselves approaching the Ideal.
...