AT MICHAELMAS.

About the time of Michael's feast

And all his angels,

There comes a word to man and beast

By dark evangels.

Then hearing what the wild things say

To one another,

Those creatures first born of our gray

Mysterious Mother,

The greatness of the world's unrest

Steals through our pulses;

Our own life takes a meaning guessed

From the torn dulse's.

The draft and set of deep sea-tides

Swirling and flowing,

Bears every filmy flake that rides,

Grandly unknowing.

The sunlight listens; thin and fine

The crickets whistle;

And floating midges fill the shine

Like a seeding thistle.

The hawkbit flies his golden flag

From rocky pasture,

Bidding his legions never lag

Through morning's vasture.

Soon we shall see the red vines ramp

Through forest borders,

And Indian summer breaking camp

To silent orders.

The glossy chestnuts swell and burst

Their prickly houses

Agog at news which reached them first

In sap's carouses.

The long noons turn the ribstons red,

The pippins yellow;

The wild duck from his reedy bed

Summons his fellow.

The robins keep the underbrush

Songless and wary,

As though they feared some frostier hush

Might bid them tarry;

Perhaps in the great North they heard

Of silence falling

Upon the world without a word,

White and appalling.

The ash-tree and the lady-fern,

In russet frondage,

Proclaim‘ tis time for our return

To vagabondage.

All summer idle have we kept;

But on a morning,

Where the blue hazy mountains slept,

A scarlet warning

Disturbs our day-dream with a start;

A leaf turns over;

And every earthling is at heart

Once more a rover.

All winter we shall toil and plod,

Eating and drinking;

But now's the little time when God

Sets folk to thinking.

“Consider,” says the quiet sun,

“How far I wander;

Yet when had I not time on one

More flower to squander?”

“Consider,” says the restless tide,

“My endless labor;

Yet when was I content beside

My nearest neighbor?”

So wander-lust to wander-lure,

As seed to season,

Must rise and wend, possessed and sure

In sweet unreason.

For doorstone and repose are good,

And kind is duty;

But joy is in the solitude

With shy-heart beauty.

And Truth is one whose ways are meek

Beyond foretelling;

And far his journey who would seek

Her lowly dwelling.

She leads him by a thousand heights,

Lonelily faring,

With sunrise and with eagle flights

To mate his daring.

For her he fronts a vaster fog

Than Leif of yore did,

Voyaging for continents no log

Has yet recorded.

He travels by a polar star,

Now bright, now hidden,

For a free land, though rest be far

And roads forbidden,

Till on a day with sweet coarse bread

And wine she stays him,

Then in a cool and narrow bed

To slumber lays him.

So we are hers. And, fellows mine

Of fin and feather,

By shady wood and shadowy brine,

When comes the weather

For migrants to be moving on,

By lost indenture

You flock and gather and are gone:

The old adventure!

I too have my unwritten date,

My gypsy presage;

And on the brink of fall I wait

The darkling message.

The sign, from prying eyes concealed,

Is yet how flagrant!

Here's ragged-robin in the field,

A simple vagrant.