BETWEEN THE BATTLES

LET us bury him here,

Where the maples are red!

He is dead,

And he died thanking God that he fell with the fall of the leaf and the year.

Where the hillside is sheer,

Let it echo our tread

Whom he led;

Let us follow as gladly as ever we followed who never knew fear.

Ere he died they had fled;

Yet they heard his last cheer

Ringing clear,—

When we lifted him up, he would fain have pursued, but grew dizzy instead.

Break his sword and his spear!

Let this last prayer be said

By the bed

We have made underneath the wet wind in the maple trees moaning so drear:

"O Lord God, by the red

Sullen end of the year

That is here,

We beseech Thee to guide us and strengthen our swords till his slayers be dead!"

O COVERING grasses! O unchanging trees!

Is it not good to feel the odorous wind

Come down upon you with such harmonies

Only the giant hills can ever find?

O little leaves, are ye not glad to be?

Is not the sunlight fair, the shadow kind,

That falls at noontide over you and me?

O gleam of birches lost among the firs,

Let your high treble chime in silverly

Across the half-imagined wind that stirs

A muffled organ-music from the pines!

Earth knows to-day that not one note of hers

Is minor. For, behold, the loud sun shines

Till the young maples are no longer gray,

And stronger grows their faint, uncertain lines;

Each violet takes a deeper blue to-day,

And purpler swell the cones hung overhead,

Until the sound of their far feet who stray

About the wood, fades from me; and, instead,

I hear a robin singing—not as one

That calls unto his mate, uncomforted—

But as one sings a welcome to the sun.