TO A HERMIT THRUSH

Dweller among leaves, and shining twilight boughs

That fold cool arms about thine altar place,

What joyous race

Of gods dost serve with such unfaltering vows?

Weave me a time-fringed tale

Of slumbering, haunted trees,

And star-sweet fragrances

No day defiled;

Of bowering nights innumerable,

And nestling hours breath-nigh a dryad's heart

That sleeping yet was wild

With dream-beat that thou mad'st a part

Of thy dawn-fluting; ay, and keep'st it still,

Striving so late these godless woods to fill

With undefeated strain,

And in one hour build the old world again.

Wast thou found singing when Diana drew

Her skirts from the first night?

Didst feel the sun-breath when the valleys grew

Warm with the love of light,

Till blades of flower-lit green gave to the wind

The mystery that made sweet

The earth forever,— strange and undefined

As life, as God, as this thy song complete

That holds with me twin memories

Of time ere men,

And ere our ways

Lay sundered with the abyss of air between?

List, I will lay

The world, my song,

Deep in the heart of day,

Day that is long

As the ages dream or the stars delay!

Keep thou from me,

Sigh-throated man,

Forever to be

Under the songless wanderer's ban.

I am of time

That counteth no dawn;

Thy æons yet climb

To skies I have won,

Seeking for aye an unrisen sun!

Soft as a shadow slips

Before the moon, I creep beneath the trees,

Even to the boughs whose lowest circling tips

Whisper with the anemones

Thick-strewn as though a cloud had made

Its drifting way through spray and leafy braid

And sunk with unremembering ease

To humbler heaven upon the mossy heaps.

And here a warmer flow

Urges thy melody, yet keeps

The cool of bowers; as might a rose blush through

Its unrelinquished dew;

Or bounteous heart that knows not woe,

Put on the robe of sighs, and fain

Would hold in love's surmise a neighbour's pain.

Ah, I have wronged thee, sprite!

So tender now thy song in flight,

So sweet its lingerings are,

It seems the liquid memory

Of time when thou didst try

Thy gleaning wing through human years,

And met, ay, knew the sigh

Of men who pray, the tears

That hide the woman's star,

The brave ascending fire

That is youth's beacon and too soon his pyre,—

Yea, all our striving, bateless and unseeing,

That builds each day our Heaven new.

More deep in time's unnearing blue,

Farther and ever fleeing

The dream that ever must pursue.

Heart-need is sorest

When the song dies:

Come to the forest,

Brother of the sighs.

Heart-need is song-need,

Brother, give me thine!

Song-meed is heart-meed,

Brother, take mine!

I go the still way,

Cover me with night;

Thou goest the will way

Into the light.

Dust and the burden

Thou shall outrun;

Bear then my guerdon,

Song, to the sun!

O little pagan with the heart of Christ,

I go bewildered from thine altar place,

These brooding boughs and grey-lit forest wings,

Nor know if thou deniest

My destiny and race,

Man's goalward falterings,

To sing the perfect joy that lay

Along the path we missed somewhere,

That led thee to thy home in air,

While we, soil-creepers, bruise our way

Toward heights and sunrise bounds

That wings may know nor feet may win

For all their scars, for all their wounds;

Or have I heard within thy strain

Not sorrow's self, but sorrowing

That thou did'st seek the way more free,

Nor took with us the trail of pain

That endeth not, e'er widening

To life that knows what Life may be;

And ere thou fall'st to silence long

Would golden parting fling:

Go, man, through death unto thy star;

I journey not so far;

My wings must fail e'en with my song.