DECEMBER 23, 1879.

A thousand houses of poesy stand around me everywhere;

They fill the earth and they fill my thought, they are in and above the air;

But to-night they have shut their doors, they have shut their shining windows fair,

And I am left in a desert world, with an aching as if of care.

I will sit me down, all aching and tired, in the midst of this never-unclosing

Of door or window that makes it look as if truth herself were dozing;

I will sit me down and make me a tent, call it poetizing or prosing,

Of what may be lying within my reach, things at my poor disposing!

Now what is nearest?— My conscious self. Here I sit quiet and say:

“Lo, I myself am already a house of poetry solemn and gay!

But, alas, the windows are shut, all shut:‘ tis a cold and foggy day,

And I have not now the light to see what is in me the same alway!”

Nay, rather I'll say: “I am a nut in the hard and frozen ground;

Above is the damp and frozen air, the cold blue sky all round;

And the power of a leafy and branchy tree is in me crushed and bound

Till the summer come and set it free from the grave-clothes in which it is wound!”

But I bethink me of something better!— something better, yea best!

“I am lying a voiceless, featherless thing in God's own perfect nest;

And the voice and the song are growing within me, slowly lifting my breast;

And his wide night-wings are closed about me, for his sun is down in the west!”

Doors and windows, tents and grave-clothes, winters and eggs and seeds,

Ye shall all be opened and broken and torn; ye are but to serve my needs!

On the will of the Father all lovely things are strung like a string of beads

For his heart to give the obedient child that the will of the father heeds.