WINTER HUES RECALLED.
Life is not all for effort: there are hours, When fancy breaks from the exacting will, And rebel thought takes schoolboy's holiday, Rejoicing in its idle strength. 'Tis then, And only at such moments, that we know The treasure of hours gone--scenes once beheld, Sweet voices and words bright and beautiful, Impetuous deeds that woke the God within us, The loveliness of forms and thoughts and colors, A moment marked and then as soon forgotten.
These things are ever near us, laid away, Hidden and waiting the appropriate times, In the quiet garner-house of memory.
There in the silent unaccounted depth, Beneath the heated strainage and the rush That teem the noisy surface of the hours, All things that ever touched us are stored up, Growing more mellow like sealed wine with age; We thought them dead, and they are but asleep.
In moments when the heart is most at rest And least expectant, from the luminous doors, And sacred dwelling place of things unfeared, They issue forth, and we who never knew Till then how potent and how real they were, Take them, and wonder, and so bless the hour.
Such gifts are sweetest when unsought. To me, As I was loitering lately in my dreams, Passing from one remembrance to another, Like him who reads upon an outstretched map, Content and idly happy, these rose up, Out of that magic well-stored picture house, No dream, rather a thing most keenly real, The memory of a moment, when with feet, Arrested and spell bound, and captured eyes, Made wide with joy and wonder, I beheld The spaces of a white and wintery land Swept with the fire of sunset, all its width Vale, forest, town, and misty eminence, A miracle of color and of beauty.
I had walked out, as I remember now, With covered ears, for the bright air was keen, To southward up the gleaming snow-packed fields, With the snowshoer's long rejoicing stride, Marching at ease. It was a radiant day In February, the month of the great struggle 'Twixt sun and frost, when with advancing spears, The glittering golden vanguard of the spring Holds the broad winter's yet unbroken rear In long-closed wavering contest. Thin pale threads Like streaks of ash across the far off blue Were drawn, nor seemed to move. A brooding silence Kept all the land, a stillness as of sleep; But in the east the grey and motionless woods, Watching the great sun's fiery slow decline, Grew deep with gold. To westward all was silver.
An hour had passed above me; I had reached The loftiest level of the snow-piled fields, Clear eyed, but unobservant, noting not, That all the plain beneath me and the hills Took on a change of color splendid, gradual, Leaving no spot the same; nor that the sun Now like a fiery torrent overflamed The great line of the west. Ere yet I turned With long stride homeward, being heated With the loose swinging motion, weary too, Nor uninclined to rest, a buried fence, Whose topmost log just shouldered from the snow, Made me a seat, and thence with heated cheeks, Grazed by the northwind's edge of stinging ice, I looked far out upon the snow-bound waste, The lifting hills and intersecting forests, The scarce marked courses of the buried streams, And as I looked lost memory of the frost, Transfixed with wonder, overborne with joy.
I saw them in their silence and their beauty, Swept by the sunset's rapid hand of fire, Sudden, mysterious, every moment deepening To some new majesty of rose or flame.
The whole broad west was like a molten sea Of crimson. In the north the light-lined hills Were veiled far off as with a mist of rose Wondrous and soft. Along the darkening east The gold of all the forests slowly changed To purple. In the valley far before me, Low sunk in sapphire shadows, from its hills, Softer and lovelier than an opening flower, Uprose a city with its sun-touched towers, A bunch of amethysts.
Like one spell-bound Caught in the presence of some god, I stood, Nor felt the keen wind and the deadly air, But watched the sun go down, and watched the gold Fade from the town and the withdrawing hills, Their westward shapes athwart the dusky red Freeze into sapphire, saw the arc of rose Rise ever higher in the violet east, Above the frore front of the uprearing night Remorsefully soft and sweet. Then I awoke As from a dream, and from my shoulders shook The warning chill, till then unfelt, unfeared.
STORM.
Out of the grey northwest, where many a day gone by Ye tugged and howled in your tempestuous grot, And evermore the huge frost giants lie, Your wizard guards in vigilance unforgot, Out of the grey northwest, for now the bonds are riven, On wide white wings your thongless flight is driven, That lulls but resteth not.
And all the grey day long, and all the dense wild night Ye wheel and hurry with the sheeted snow, By cedared waste and many a pine-dark height, Across white rivers frozen fast below; Over the lonely forests, where the flowers yet sleeping Turn in their narrow beds with dreams of weeping In some remembered woe;
Across the unfenced wide marsh levels, where the dry Brown ferns sigh out, and last year's sedges scold In some drear language, rustling haggardly Their thin dead leaves and dusky hoods of gold; Across grey beechwoods where the pallid leaves unfalling In the blind gusts like homeless ghosts are calling With voices cracked and old;
Across the solitary clearings, where the low Fierce gusts howl through the blinded woods, and round The buried shanties all day long the snow Sifts and piles up in many a spectral mound; Across lone villages in eery wildernesses Whose hidden life no living shape confesses Nor any human sound;
Across the serried masses of dim cities, blown Full of the snow that ever shifts and swells, While far above them all their towers of stone Stand and beat back your fierce and tyrannous spells, And hour by hour send out, like voices torn and broken Of battling giants that have grandly spoken, The veering sound of bells;
So day and night, oh wind, with hiss and moan you fleet, Where once long gone on many a green-leafed day Your gentler brethren wandered with light feet And sang with voices soft and sweet as they, The same blind thought that you with wilder might are speaking, Seeking the same strange thing that you are seeking In this your stormier way.
Oh wind, wild-voiced brother, in your northern cave, My spirit also being so beset With pride and pain, I heard you beat and rave, Grinding your chains with furious howl and fret, Knowing full well that all earth's moving things inherit The same chained might and madness of the spirit, That none may quite forget.
You in your cave of snows, we in our narrow girth Of need and sense, forever chafe and pine; Only in moods of some demonic birth Our souls take fire, our flashing wings untwine; Even like you, mad wind, above our broken prison, With streaming hair and maddened eyes uprisen, We dream ourselves divine;
Mad moods that come and go in some mysterious way, That flash and fall, none knoweth how or why, Oh wind, our brother, they are yours to-day, The stormy joy, the sweeping mastery; Deep in our narrow cells, we hear you, we awaken With hands afret and bosoms strangely shaken, We answer to your cry.
I most that love you, wind, when you are fierce and free, In these dull fetters cannot long remain; Lo, I will rise and break my thongs and flee Forth to your drift and beating, till my brain Even for an hour grow wild in your divine embraces, And then creep back into mine earthly traces, And bind me with my chain.
Nay, wind, I hear you, desperate brother, in your might Whistle and howl; I shall not tarry long, And though the day be blind and fierce, the night Be dense and wild, I still am glad and strong To meet you face to face; through all your gust and drifting With brow held high, my joyous hands uplifting, I cry you song for song.
MIDNIGHT.
From where I sit, I see the stars, And down the chilly floor The moon between the frozen bars Is glimmering dim and hoar.
Without in many a peaked mound The glinting snowdrifts lie; There is no voice or living sound; The embers slowly die.
Yet some wild thing is in mine ear; I hold my breath and hark; Out of the depth I seem to hear A crying in the dark:
No sound of man or wife or child, No sound of beast that groans, Or of the wind that whistles wild, Or of the tree that moans:
I know not what it is I hear; I bend my head and hark: I cannot drive it from mine ear, That crying in the dark.
SONG OF THE STREAM-DROPS.
By silent forest and field and mossy stone, We come from the wooded hill, and we go to the sea.
We labour, and sing sweet songs, but we never moan, For our mother, the sea, is calling us cheerily.
We have heard her calling us many and many a day From the cool grey stones and the white sands far away.
The way is long, and winding and slow is the track, The sharp rocks fret us, the eddies bring us delay, But we sing sweet songs to our mother, and answer her back; Gladly we answer our mother, sweetly repay.
Oh, we hear, we hear her singing wherever we roam, Far, far away in the silence, calling us home.
Poor mortal, your ears are dull, and you cannot hear; But we, we hear it, the breast of our mother abeat; Low, far away, sweet and solemn and clear, Under the hush of the night, under the noontide heat: And we sing sweet songs to our mother, for so we shall please her best, Songs of beauty and peace, freedom and infinite rest.
We sing, and sing, through the grass and the stones and the reeds, And we never grow tired, though we journey ever and aye, Dreaming, and dreaming, wherever the long way leads, Of the far cool rocks and the rush of the wind and the spray.
Under the sun and the stars we murmur and dance and are free, And we dream and dream of our mother, the width of the sheltering sea.
BETWEEN THE RAPIDS.
The point is turned; the twilight shadow fills The wheeling stream, the soft receding shore, And on our ears from deep among the hills Breaks now the rapid's sudden quickening roar.
Ah yet the same, or have they changed their face, The fair green fields, and can it still be seen, The white log cottage near the mountain's base, So bright and quiet, so home-like and serene?
Ah, well I question, for as five years go, How many blessings fall, and how much woe.
Aye there they are, nor have they changed their cheer, The fields, the hut, the leafy mountain brows; Across the lonely dusk again I hear The loitering bells, the lowing of the cows, The bleat of many sheep, the stilly rush Of the low whispering river, and through all, Soft human tongues that break the deepening hush With faint-heard song or desultory call: Oh comrades hold; the longest reach is past; The stream runs swift, and we are flying fast.
The shore, the fields, the cottage just the same, But how with them whose memory makes them sweet?
Oh if I called them, hailing name by name, Would the same lips the same old shouts repeat?
Have the rough years, so big with death and ill, Gone lightly by and left them smiling yet?
Wild black-eyed Jeanne whose tongue was never still, Old wrinkled Picaud, Pierre and pale Lisette, The homely hearts that never cared to range, While life's wide fields were filled with rush and change.
And where is Jacques, and where is Verginie?
I cannot tell; the fields are all a blur.
The lowing cows whose shapes I scarcely see, Oh do they wait and do they call for her?
And is she changed, or is her heart still clear As wind or morning, light as river foam?