Making it chuckle and sing and speak [Page 328]
In Solitary Places
XIV
Ere that small sisterhood of misty stars,
The Pleiadës, consents to grace the sky;
While still through sunset’s golds and cinnabars
The evening-star, like an Aladdin eye
Of bright enchantment, at the day’s last hour,
Looks downward from its twilight-builded tower,
Listen, and you may hear, now low, now high,
A voice, a summons, fainter than a flower.
There is a fellowship so still and sweet,
A brotherhood, that speaks, unwordable,
In every tree, in every stream you meet,
The soul is fain to dream beneath its spell.—
And heart-admitted to their presence there,
Those intimacies of the earth and air,
It shall hear things too wonderful to tell,
Too deep to interpret, and more sweet than prayer.
And you may see the things that are unseen,
And hear the things that never have been heard:
The whisper of the woods, in gray and green,
Will walk by you, its heart a wildwood bird;
Or by your side, in hushed and solemn wise,
The silence sit; and clothed in glimmering dyes
Of pearl and purple, with a sunset word,
The dusk steal to you with tenebrious eyes.
Then through the ugliness that toils in night.
Uncouth, obscure, that hates the glare of day,
Dull things that pierce the earth, avoid the light,
And hide themselves in clamminess and clay,—
The dumb, ungainly things, that make a home
Of mud and mire they hill and honeycomb,—
Through these, perhaps, in some mysterious way
Beauty may speak, fairer than wind-wild foam.