Voices of Unseen Spirits
HERE falls no light of sun nor stars;
No stir nor striving here intrudes;
No moan nor merry-making mars
The quiet of these solitudes.
Submerged in sleep, the passive soul
Is one with all the things that seem;
Night blurs in one confusëd whole
Alike the dreamer and the dream.
O dwellers...
“give me a fillet, Love,” quoth I,
“To bind my Sweeting’s heart to me,
So ne’er a chance of earth or sky
Shall part us ruthlessly:
A fillet, Love, but not to chafe
My Sweeting’s soul, to cause her pain;
But just to bind her close and safe
Through snow and blossom sun and rain:
A fillet, boy!”
Love said, “Here ’...
Along the country roadside, stone on stone,
Past waving grain-field, and near broken stile,
The walls stretch onward, an uneven pile,
With rankling vines and lichen overgrown:
So stand they sentinel. Unchanged, alone,
They ’re left to watch the seasons’ passing slow:
The summer’s sunlight or the winter’s snow,
The spring-time’s birdling,...
Throughout the soft and sunlit day
The pennoned pines, in strict array,
Stand grim and silent, gaunt and gray.
But when the blasts of winter keen,
They whisper each to each, and lean
Like comrades with a bond between.
And seeing them deport them so,
One almost thinks they seek to show
How mortal-like mere trees may grow.
They made them ready and we saw them go
Out of our very lives;
Yet this world holds them all,
And soon it must befall
That we shall know
How this one fares, how that one thrives;
And one day—who knows when?
They shall be with us here again.
Another traveller left us late
Whose life was as the soul of ours;
A...
The village sleeps, a name unknown, till men
With life-blood stain its soil, and pay the due
That lifts it to eternal fame,—for then
’T is grown a Gettysburg or Waterloo.
“whom the gods love die young;”—if gods ye be,
Then generously might ye have spared to us
One from your vast unnumbered overplus,
One youth we loved as tenderly as ye.
There is no rhyme that is half so sweet
As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;
There is no metre that ’s half so fine
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.—
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of...
Can freckled Auguest,—drowsing warm and blonde
Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead,
In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,—
O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed
To thee? when no plumed weed, no feather’d seed
Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,
That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses,
...
Teach me the secret of thy loveliness,
That, being made wise, I may aspire to be
As beautiful in thought, and so express
Immortal truths to earth’s mortality;
Though to my soul ability be less
Than ’t is to thee, O sweet anemone.
Teach me the secret of thy innocence,
That in simplicity I may grow wise,
Asking from Art no...
