INTER VIAS

‘ Tis a land where no hurricane falls,

But the infinite azure regards

Its waters for ever, its walls

Of granite, its limitless swards;

Where the fens to their innermost pool

With the chorus of May are aring,

And the glades are wind-winnowed and cool

With perpetual spring;

Where folded and half withdrawn

The delicate wind-flowers blow,

And the bloodroot kindles at dawn

Her spiritual taper of snow;

Where the limits are met and spanned

By a waste that no husbandman tills,

And the earth-old pine forests stand

In the hollows of hills.

‘ Tis the land that our babies behold,

Deep gazing when none are aware;

And the great-hearted seers of old

And the poets have known it, and there

Made halt by the well-heads of truth

On their difficult pilgrimage

From the rose-ruddy gardens of youth

To the summits of age.

Now too, as of old, it is sweet

With a presence remote and serene;

Still its byways are pressed by the feet

Of the mother immortal, its queen:

The huntress whose tresses, flung free,

And her fillets of gold, upon earth,

They only have honour to see

Who are dreamers from birth.

In her calm and her beauty supreme,

They have found her at dawn or at eve,

By the marge of some motionless stream,

Or where shadows rebuild or unweave

In a murmurous alley of pine,

Looking upward in silent surprise,

A figure, slow-moving, divine,

With inscrutable eyes.