THE CHENEAUX ISLANDS
There is a wistful, lingering regret
Ever for those whose feet are set
On other paths than where their childhood moved,
And, having loved
The old colonial hills, no level plain,
No tangled forest, the same hope contain,
And by the northern lakes I stand unsatisfied,
Watching the tremulous shadows start and slide,
Hearing the listless waves among the stones,
And the low tones
Of a breeze that through the hemlocks creeps.
Veiled in grey ashes sleeps
The campfire, and thin streams
Of smoke float off like beckoning dreams
Of peaceful men. Around me broods
The sense of aged solitudes,
Of lonely places where
Cold winds have torn blue midnight air
And dipped beneath the edges of the leaves
To moons unchronicled.
We bring
The talk of cities and of schools,
Yet to these quiet pools,
Calm with a thousand silent morns and eves,
It seems no alien thing;
The shadows of the woods
Are brothers to our moods.
Nor less in the quick rush of vivid streets,
And libraries with long rows of mouldering thought,
Is nature, than in green retreats;
Whither from year to year
I come with eager eye and ear,
Hoping, some leafy hour, to feel,
In ways of civic feet unsought,
A secret from the brown earth steal
Into my spirit, and reveal
Some wisdom of a larger worth,
Some quiet truth of growth and birth;
If we, the kindred on the earth,
Are kindred with her, to one issue moving on
Of melancholy night or shimmering dawn,
Surely befits we wanderers wild
To her confederate breast be reconciled;
Out of her primal sleep we came,
And she still dreams; of us that hold
Such strenuous course and venture bold,
Whom such unknown ambition stirs,
Asks of our bright, unsteady flame:
What issue ours that is not hers?
How came he once to these green isles
And channels winding miles and miles,
Cross clasped in hand and pale face set,
The Jesuit, Père Marquette?
To sombre nations, with the blight
Of dead leaves in the blood,
The eager priest into their solitude
And melancholy mood
Flashed like a lamp at night
In sluggish sleepers' eyes;
Out of the east where mornings rise
Came like the morning into ashen skies
With the east's subtle fire and surprise,
And stern beyond his knowledge brought
A message other than he thought:
"Lo! an edict here from the throne of fate,
Whose banners are lifted and armies wait;
The fight moves on at the front, it says,
And the word hath come after many days:
Ye shall walk no more in your ancient ways."
Father, the word has come and gone,
The torpid races
Slumbered, and vanished from their places;
And in our ears intoning ring
The words of that most weary king
In Israel, King Solomon.
Over the earth's untroubled face
The restless generations pace,
Finding their graves regretfully;
Is there no crown, nor any worth,
For men who build upon the earth
What time treads down forgetfully?
Unchanged the graven statute lies,
The code star-lettered in the skies.
It is written there, it is written here;
The law that knows not far or near
Is sacrifice;
And bird and flower, and beast and tree,
Kingdom and planet wheeling free
Are sacrificed incessantly.
From dark, through dusk, toward light, we tread
On the thorn-crowned foreheads of the dead.
The law says not there is nothing lost;
It only says that the end is gain;
The gain may be at the helpless cost
Of hands that give in vain;
And in this world, where many give,
None gives the widow's mite save he
That, having but one life to live,
Gives that one life so utterly.
Thou that unknowing didst obey,
With straitened thought and clouded eye,
The law, we learn at this late day,
O Père Marquette, whose war is done,
Ours is the charge to bear it on,
To hold the veering banner high
Until we die,
To meet the issue in whose awe
Our kindred earth we stand above,
If knowing sacrifice is law,
We sacrifice ourselves for love.
Or are we then such stuff as fills a dream?
Some wide-browed spirit dreams us, where he stands
Watching the long twilight's stream
Below his solemn hands,
Whose reverie and shaping thought began
Before the stars in their large order ran?
Fluid we are, our days flow on,
And round them flow the rivers of the sun,
As long ago in places where
The Halicarnassian wandered with his curious eyes
On Egypt's mysteries,
And Babylonian gardens of the air
Hung green above the city wall.
If this were all, if this were all—
If it were all of life to give
Our hearts to God and slip away,
And if the end for which we live
Were simple as the close of day,
Were simple as the fathers say,
Were simple as their peace was deep
Who in the old faith fell asleep!
No night bird now makes murmur; in the trees
No drowsy chuckle of dark-nested ease.
The campfire's last grey embers fall.
With dipping prow and shallop sides
The slender moon to her mooring rides
Over the ridge of Isle La Salle,
Under the lee of the world,
Her filmy halliards coiled and thin sails furled,
And silver clouds about her phantom rudder curled.