* THE CIRCLE *

When shepherd darkness folds the fading day

And faints the West beneath the world’ s wide brim,

There stands a brotherhood, remote and dim,

Of cowled and hooded wights rolled up in granite grey.

Spirits of dusk from out a far-off prime

Beyond the shadowy pale of bygone eld,

Immutable and constant and unquelled,

They hold their everlasting state and tryst with Time.

These stones have seen the red-eyed wolf pack throng

To slay the fleeting elk upon the waste,

And they have marked the cave bear’ s clumsy haste,

Shuffling great golden furse and ragged rocks among.

O cirque, what meanest thou? Sepulchral lore,

Or ritual of the quick? Did thirsty god

Drink blood of sacrifice upon this sod?

Art thou a temple wrought for deities of yore?

What dread, what joy, what Neolithic rule,

What shouts of agony or pæans of praise

Awoke, ye stones, the morning of your days?

They answer not, but seek the shadowy crepuscule.

The Stone Man lifted them; his hairy hand

They felt and knew, when Night’ s eternal brow

Gleamed with another diadem than now

Ere Egypt’ s mountain graves pressed on the desert sand.

Bowed but enduring, Time hath failed to break

That emblem of eternity they trace

Upon the bosom of this desolate place;

And holy shall it be for their most ancient sake.

They have withdrawn upon the unseen light

Of immemorial time; the vanished past

Receives them once again to haunt her vast —

A sanctity beyond wild Chaos and old Night.