THE DREAMER

Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers,

And mark the loafing sunlight's lazy laugh;

Or, on each season, spell the epitaph

Of its dead months repeated in their flowers;

Or list the music of the strolling showers,

Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff,

Or read the day's delivered monograph

Through all the chapters of its daedal hours.

Still with the same child-faith and child regard

He looks on Nature, hearing at her heart,

The Beautiful beat out the time and place,

Through which no lesson of this life is hard,

No struggle vain of science or of art,

That dies with failure written on its face.