Undertones

Excerpt

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,
Whereby no lesson of this life is hard,
No struggle vain of science or of art,
That dies with failure written on its face.

A log-hut in the solitude,
A clapboard roof to rest beneath!
This side, the shadow-haunted wood;
That side, the sunlight-haunted heath.
At daybreak Morn shall come to me
In raiment of the white winds spun;
Slim in her rosy hand the key
That opes the gateway of the sun.
Her smile shall help my heart enough
With love to labor all the day,
And cheer the road, whose rocks are rough,
With her smooth footprints, each a ray.
At dusk a voice shall call afar,
A lone voice like the whippoorwill's;
And, on her shimmering brow one star,
Night shall descend the western hills.
She at my door till dawn shall stand,
With Gothic eyes, that, dark and deep,
Are mirrors of a mystic land,
Fantastic with the towns of sleep.

UNQUALIFIED

Not his the part to win the goal,
The flaming goal that flies before,
Into whose course the apples roll
Of self that stay his feet the more.
Beyond himself he shall not win
Whose flesh is as a driven dust,
That his own soul must wander in,
Seeing no farther than his lust.
Is mine the part of no companion hand
Of help, except my shadow's silent self?
A moonlight traveller in Fancy's land
Of leering gnome and hollow-laughing elf;
Whose forests deepen and whose moon goes down,
When Night's blind shadow shall usurp my own;
And, mid the dust and wreck of some old town,
The City of Dreams, I grope and fall alone.

THE WOOD

Witch-hazel, dogwood, and the maple here;
And there the oak and hickory;
Linn, poplar, and the beech-tree, far and near
As the eased eye can see.
Wild-ginger; wahoo, with its wan balloons;
And brakes of briers of a twilight green;
And fox-grapes plumed with summer; and strung moons
Of mandrake flowers between.
Deep gold-green ferns, and mosses red and gray,—
Mats for what naked myth's white feet?—
And, cool and calm, a cascade far away
With even-falling beat.
Old logs, made sweet with death; rough bits of bark;
And tangled twig and knotted root;
And sunshine splashes and great pools of dark;
And many a wild-bird's flute.
Here let me sit until the Indian, Dusk,
With copper-colored feet, comes down;
Sowing the wildwood with star-fire and musk,
And shadows blue and brown.
Then side by side with some magician dream,
To take the owlet-haunted lane,
Half-roofed with vines; led by a firefly gleam,
That brings me home again.
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