All æons, conquests, excellencies, stars,
All pain and peril of seraphic wars,
Were met to shape thy soul’s divinity.
Pause, for the breath of gods is on thy face!
The ghost of dawns forgotten and to be
Abides a moment in the twilight’s grace.
MORNING TWILIGHT
An early thrush acclaims the light—
The wide, low-billowing day
O’er dews and grasses chill with night
Upcasts its foam of grey.
Now end the darkness and its dreams.
The ashen moon is low;
Like petal-drift on placid streams
We watch her sink and go.
And like a dryad to her tree
The morning star hath sped—
Gone ere an eye essayed to see
The path whereon she fled.
Hark how, as here we stand the wards
Of woodlands newly green,
The pine’s innumerable chords
Are touched by hands unseen!
Hearing, the forest seems forlorn
And all the air a sigh
Of things that seek a vaster morn,
And find it not, and die.
O tranquil hour! the haggard noon
Shall make a ghost of thee
Soon to be memory’s, and soon
Not even of memory.
AN ALTAR OF THE WEST
(Point Lobos, the southern boundary of Carmel Bay.)
Beauty, what dost thou here?
Why hauntest thou this empery of pain
Where men in vain
Long for another sphere?
Art not an exile shy,
A dreamer ’mid the swords,
Upon this iron world where men defy
Time and its hidden lords?
Thou waitest with a splendor on thy brow.
And seem’st to watch with compensating eyes
Each jest our dwarfing Fates devise;
And after all the strife,
’Tis thou
Who standest where the slayers’ feet have trod—
Perchance a portion of this dream of God
That will not go from life.