A CHARACTER.

He lived beyond us and we stood

As pygmies to his every mood,

Mere pupils at his beck and nod,

That spoke the influence of a god.

And oft we wondered, when his thought

Made our humanity seem naught,

If he, like Uther's mystic son,

Were not a birth for Avalon.

When wand'ring‘ neath the sighing trees,

His soul waxed genial with the breeze,

That, voiceful, from the piney glades

Companioned seemed of Oreads;

A Dryad life lived in each oak,

And with its many leaf-tongues spoke,

Glorying the deity whose power

Gave it its life in sun and shower.

By every violet-hallowed brook,

Where every bramble-matted nook

Rippled and laughed with water-sounds,

He walked as one on sainted grounds,

Fearing intrusion on the spell

That kept some fountain-spirit's well,

Or woodland genius sitting where

Brown racy berries kissed his hair.

And when the wind far o'er the hill

Had fall'n and left the wildwood still

As moonlight jets on quiet moss,—

Beneath the pied boughs arched across

Long limpid vistas, brimmed with ripe

Green-swimming sunbeams, heard the pipe

Of some hid follower of Pan

And worshiper, half brute half man;

Who, hairy-haunched, a savage rhyme

Puffed in his reed to rudest time;

With swollen jowl and rolling eye

Danced boisterous where the silver sky

Smiled in the forest's broken roof;

The strident branch beneath his hoof

Snapped on the sod which, interfused

Between black roots, was crushed and bruised.

And often when he wandered through

Old forests at the fall of dew,—

A lone Endymion who sought

A higher beauty yet uncaught,—

Some night, we thought, most surely he

Were favored of her deity,

And in the holy solitude

Her sudden presence, long pursued,

Unto his eyes would be confessed;

The awful moonlight of her breast

Come high with majesty and hold

His heart's blood till his heart were cold,

Unpulsed, unsinewed, all undone,

And snatch his soul to Avalon.