From the Hand of a Child

Diana flying with her maidens white,

Down the long reaches of the laureled hills.
Above the sea I saw a wreath of girls,
Fading to air in far-off poppy fields.

I saw a blithe youth take the open road:
His thoughts ran on before him merrily;
Sometimes he dipped his feet in stirring brooks;
At night he slept upon a bed of boughs.

This in my soul. Then suddenly a shape,
A spectre wearing yet the mask of dust,
Jostled against me as he passed, and lo!
The jarring city and the drift of feet
Surged back upon me like the grieving sea.

At the Meeting of Seven Valleys

At the meeting of seven valleys in the west,
I came upon a host of silent souls,

Seated beside still waters on the grass.
It was a place of memories and tears-
Terrible tears. I rested in a wood,

And there the bird that mourns for Itys sang -
Itys that touched the tears of all the world.
But climbing onward toward the purple peaks,
I passed, on silent feet, white multitudes,
Beyond the reach of peering memories,
Lying asleep upon the scented banks,
Their bodies burning with celestial fire.

A mighty awe came on me at the thought—
The strangeness of the beatific sleep,

The vision of God, the mystic bread of rest.

The Rock-Breaker

Pausing he leans upon his sledge, and looksA labor-blasted toiler:

So have I seen, on Shasta's top, a pine

Stand silent on a cliff,

Stript of its glory of green leaves and boughs, Its great trunk split by fire,

Its

gray bark blackened by the thunder-smoke, Its life a sacrifice

To some blind purpose of the Destinies.

These songs will perish like the shapes of air
The singer and the songs die out forever;
But star-eyed Truth (greater than song or singer)
Sweeps hurrying on: far off she sees a gleam
Upon a peak. She cried to man of old
To build the enduring, glad Fraternal State
Cries yet through all the ruins of the world
Through Karnak, through the stones of Babylon —
Cries for a moment through these fading songs.

On wingèd feet, a form of fadeless youth,
She goes to meet the coming centuries,

These Songs Will Perish

And hurrying, snatches up some human reed, Blows through it once her terror-bearing note, And breaks and throws away.

If we can be a bugle at her lips,

It is enough

To scatter her contagion on mankind.