withdraw thee, soul, from strife.
Enter thine unseen bark,
And sail across the dark,
The silent sea of life.
Leave Care and Grief, feared now no more,
To wave and beckon from the shore.
Thy tenement is bare.
Shut are the burning eyes,
Ears deaf against surprise,
Limbs in a posture fair.
...
What time the earth takes on the garb of Spring,
And new-born joy runs riot in the blood,
When the year’s tide turns refluent to its flood,
And blissful birds their songs are carolling,—
When life once more is fair, and everything
In nature smiles, when tender flowrets bud,
And deck the mead as stars the heavens stud,—
What wonder that my...
Not merely for our pleasure, but to purge
The soul from baseness, from ignoble fear,
And all the passions that make dim the clear
Calm vision of the world; our feet to urge
On to ideal far-set goals; to merge
Our being with the heart of things; brought near
The springs of life, to make us see and hear
And feel its swelling and pulsating...
Sin-satiate, and haggard with despair,
Freed from the unholy mountain’s baleful spell,
Forth coming from the very pit of Hell,
The fallen knight repentant kneels in prayer.
But hark! what solemn strains fill all the air?
What pilgrim chants now on the morning swell,
And pour hope’s balm upon his soul, and tell
Of pardon, if he to Christ’s...
Strain, strain thine eyes, this parting is for aye!
Grief have her will of thee! Thy faith confessed
To his unequal, he must go, the quest
Fulfilled that brought him hither on thy day
Of imminent, direst peril. Now away
To other shores bids him the Grail’s behest.
Thou knewest him too late to spare thy breast
This keen remorse, thy soul...
Spirit of song, whose shining wings have borne
Our souls of old to many a clear blue height,
Comes there the day that leaves our world forlorn
Of thy clear singing in the haunted night?
For while from out the western radiance low
Like stars the great dead shining upward go,
Behold, thy wings are poised to join their flight:
Yet follow not...
When almond buds unclose,
Soft white and tender rose,—
A swarm of white moth things,
With sunset on their wings,
That fluttering settle down
On branches chill and brown;
When all the sky is blue,
And up from grasses new
Blithe springs the meadow lark,—
Sweet, sweet, from dawn to dark;—
When all the young year’s way...
Soul of a tree ungrown, new life out of God’s life proceeding,
Folded close in the seed, waking—O wonder of wonders—
Waking with power as a spirit to clothe thee in leaves and in branches,
What, in thine age-long future, is the word thou art set here to say?
Far in the great Sierra dwell the mighty groups of thy kindred;
Aisles of the sounding...
She roves through shadowy solitudes,
Where scentless herbs and fragile flowers
Pine in the gloom that ever broods
Around her sylvan bowers.
No winds amid the branches sigh,
No football wakes the sodden ground;
And the cold streams that hurry by
Flow on without a sound.
Strange, voiceless birds from spray to spray...
The bedouins OF THE SKIES
YON clouds that roam the deserts of the air,
On wind-swift barbs, o’er many an azure plain,
Scarce pause to lift to Allah one small prayer,
Ere Ishmael’s spirit drives them forth again.
THE TWO SPIRITS
I DREAMED two spirits came—one dusk as night:
“Mortals miscall me Life,” he sadly saith;
The other...
