The Flying Mist

I watch afar the moving Mystery,

The wool-shod, formless terror of the sea—
The Mystery whose lightest touch can change
The world God made to phantasy, death-strange.
Under its spell all things grow old and gray
As they will be beyond the Judgment Day.
All voices, at the lifting of some hand,
Seem calling to us from another land.

Is it the still Power of the Sepulcher

That makes all things the wraiths of things that were?

It touches, one by one, the wayside posts,
And they are gone, a line of hurrying ghosts.
It creeps upon the towns with stealthy feet,
And men are phantoms on a phantom street.
It strikes the towers and they are shafts of air,
Above the spectres passing in the square.

The Flying Mist

The city turns to ashes, spire by spire;
The mountains perish with their peaks afire.
The fading city and the falling sky

Are swallowed in one doom without a cry.

It tracks the traveler fleeing with the gale, Fleeing toward home and friends without avail; It springs upon him and he is a ghost,

A blurred shape moving on a soundless coast. God! it pursues my love along the stream, Swirls round her and she is forever dream. What Hate has touched the universe with eld, And left me only in a world dispelled?

One day a child ran after me in the street,
To give me a half-blown rose, a fire-white rose,
Its stem all warm yet from the tight-shut hand.
The little gift seemed somehow more to me
Than all men strive for in the turbid towns,
Than all they hoard up through a long wild life.
And as I breathed the heart-breath of the flower,
The Youth of Earth broke on me like a dawn,
And I was with the wide-eyed wondering things,
Back in the far forgotten buried time.

A lost world came back softly with the rose:
I saw a glad host follow with lusty cries

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.