A Lyric of the Dawn

Alone I list

In the leafy tryst;

Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep—
Silent the phantom wood in waters deep:
No footfall of a wind along the pass
Startles a harebell-stirs a blade of grass.
Yonder the wandering weeds,
Enchanted in the light,

Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white;
Yonder are plumy reeds,

Dusking the border of the clear lagoon;
Far off the silver clifts

Hang in ethereal light below the moon;
Far off the ocean lifts,

Tossing its billows in the misty beam,
And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream :

A Lyric of the Dawn

I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken:
This is the valley: here the branches darken
The silver-lighted stream.

That

rapture in the leafy dark!

Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing,
Waking the upland and the valley under?
What carols, like the blazon of a king,
Fill all the dawn with wonder?

Oh, hush,

It is the thrush,

In the deep and woody glen!

Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung,
When the old Earth was young;

That rapture rang,

When the first morning on the mountains sprang: And now he shouts, and the world is young again!

Carol, my king,

On your bough aswing!

Thou art not of these evil days —

Thou art a voice of the world's lost youth:

Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth
How to find God upon these hungry ways;

Tell of the golden prime,

A Lyric of the Dawn

When men beheld swift deities descend,
Before the race was left alone with Time,
Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end,
When bird and beast could make a man their
friend;

Before great Pan was dead,

Before the naiads fled;

When maidens white with dark eyes shy and

bold,

With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold,
Startled the still dawn-

Shone in upon the mountains and were gone,
Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old.
Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways,
Before the weird earth-hunger of these days,
When there was rippling mirth,

When justice was on Earth,

And light and grandeur of the Golden Age;
When never a heart was sad,

When all from king to herdsman had

A penny for a wage.

Ah, that old time has faded to a dream

The moon's fair face is broken in the stream;

Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let

The exiled race not utterly forget;

A Lyric of the Dawn

Publish thy revelation on the lawns-
Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns;

Sometime, in some sweet year,

These stormy souls, these men of Earth

But hark again,

From the secret glen,

That voice of rapture and ethereal youth

Now laden with despair.

Forbear, O bird, forbear:

Is life not terrible enough, forsooth?
Cease, cease the mystic song-

No more, no more, the passion and the pain :
It wakes my life to fret against the chain;
It makes me think of all the agèd wrong-
Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all
Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall.
Ah, ah, that voice again!

It makes me think of all these restless men,
Called into time-their progress and their goal;
And now, oh now, it sends into my soul.
Dreams of a love that might have been for me-
That might have been—and now can never be.
Tell me no more of these-

Tell me of tranced trees

A Lyric of the Dawn

(The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare);
Show me the leafy home of the wild bees;
Show me the snowy summits dim in air;
Tell me of things afar

In valleys silent under moon and star:
Dim hollows hushed with night,
The lofty cedars misty in the light,
Wild clusters of the vine,

Wild odors of the pine,

The eagle's eyrie lifted to the moon —
High places where on quiet afternoon

A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream

Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a

dream.

Ha, now

He springs from the bough,

It flickers-he is lost!

Out of the copse he sprang;

This is the floating briar where he tossed :
The leaves are yet atremble where he sang.
Here a long vista opens-look!

This is the way he took,

Through the pale poplars by the pond:
Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond.