I see a tiny fluttering form
Beneath the soft snow’s soundless storm,
’Mid a strange noonlight palely shed
Through mocking cloud-rifts overhead.
All other birds are far from sight,—
They think the day has turned to night;
But he is cast in hardier mould,
This chirping courier of the cold.
He does not come from lands forlorn,...
Thy one white leaf is open to the sky,
And o’er thy heart swift lights and shadows pass,—
The wooing winds seem loath to wander by,
Jealous of sunshine and the summer grass.
Thy sylvan loveliness is pure and strong,
For thou art bright and yet not overbold—
Like a young maid apart from fashion’s throng—
A virgin dowered with a...
Moonlight song OF THE MOCKING-BIRD
EACH golden note of music greets
The listening leaves, divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird.
NIGHT MISTS
SOMETIMES, when Nature falls asleep,
Around her woods and streams
The mists of night serenely creep—
For they are Nature’s dreams....
A throat of thunder, a tameless heart,
And a passion malign and free,
He is no sheik of the desert sand.
But an Arab of the sea!
He sprang from the womb of some wild cloud,
And was born to smite and slay:
To soar like a million hawks set free,
And swoop on his ocean prey!
He has scourged the Sea till her mighty breast...
Just ere the darkness is withdrawn,
In seasons of cold or heat,
Close to the boundary line of Dawn
These mystical brothers meet.
They clasp their weird and shadowy hands,
As they listen each to each,
But never a mortal understands
Their strange immortal speech.
Out of the mighty Yule log came
The crooning of the lithe wood-flame,—
A single bar of music fraught
With cheerful yet half pensive thought,—
A thought elusive: out of reach,
Yet trembling on the verge of speech.
Moonlight Song OF THE MOCKING-BIRD
EACH golden note of music greets
The listening leaves, divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird.
NIGHT MISTS
SOMETIMES, when Nature falls asleep,
Around her woods and streams
The mists of night serenely creep—
For they are Nature’s dreams....
