Like a bird among the trees,
Singing, Glooskap spake once more:
Baby listened to the glees,
Sucked his thumb, and sat at ease
Still upon the floor.
Thundering, the magician spoke:
"Hither, Baby, I command!"
Baby stirred not, only broke
Into wailings that awoke
All the desert land.
Mystic song and magic spell,
Fit to raise the very dead,
Fit to rule the imps that dwell
In the deepest depths of Hell,
Glooskap sang and said.
All was vain. Upon the floor
Baby sat, and heard each lay,
Listened close, and called for more,
When each mystic song was o'er,
But did not obey.
Then the baffled warrior wept;
And the baby in delight,
Sitting where a sunbeam slept,
Laughed and crowed, and crowing kept,
Till his foe took flight.
LIFE IN NATURE.
Life grows not more nor less; it is but force
And only changes;
Expended here, it takes another course,
And ever ranges
Throughout this circling universe of ours,
Now quickening man, now in his grave-grown flowers.
Yet dwells life not alone in man and beast
And budding flowers.
It lurks in all things, from the very least
Gleam in dark bowers
Of the great sun, through stones, and sea, and air,
Up to ourselves, in Nature everywhere.
Life differs from the soul. This is beyond
The realms of science;
God and mankind it joins in closest bond,
And bids defiance
To Death and Change. By faith alone confessed,
It dwells within our bodies as a guest.
The germ of life sleeps in the aged hills
And stately rivets,
And wakes into the life our hearts that thrills
And in leaves quivers.
The universe is one great reservoir
From which man draws of thinking life his store.