AN ANTHEM OF EARTH.

Immeasurable Earth!

Through the loud vast and populacy of Heaven,

Tempested with gold schools of ponderous orbs,

That cleav'st with deep-revolting harmonies

Passage perpetual, and behind thee draw'st

A furrow sweet, a cometary wake

Of trailing music! What large effluence,

Not sole the cloudy sighing of thy seas,

Nor thy blue-coifing air, encases thee

From prying of the stars, and the broad shafts

Of thrusting sunlight tempers? For, dropped near

From my remov-ed tour in the serene

Of utmost contemplation, I scent lives.

This is the efflux of thy rocks and fields,

And wind-cuffed forestage, and the souls of men,

And aura of all treaders over thee;

A sentient exhalation, wherein close

The odorous lives of many-throated flowers,

And each thing's mettle effused; that so thou wear'st,

Even like a breather on a frosty morn,

Thy proper suspiration. For I know,

Albeit, with custom-dulled perceivingness,

Nestled against thy breast, my sense not take

The breathings of thy nostrils, there's no tree,

No grain of dust, nor no cold-seeming stone,

But wears a fume of its circumfluous self.

Thine own life and the lives of all that live,

The issue of thy loins,

Is this thy gaberdine,

Wherein thou walkest through thy large demesne

And sphery pleasances,—

Amazing the unstal-ed eyes of Heaven,

And us that still a precious seeing have

Behind this dim and mortal jelly.

Ah!

If not in all too late and frozen a day

I come in rearward of the throats of song,

Unto the deaf sense of the ag-ed year

Singing with doom upon me; yet give heed!

One poet with sick pinion, that still feels

Breath through the Orient gateways closing fast,

Fast closing t'ward the undelighted night!