XL
Oh, bright the day, and calm and cool
With clouds, like cotton-fields that swoon
Beneath the silver summer moon;
And, quiet as a forest pool,—
Where Autumn sits and combs her locks,
And strews with rainbow leaves and roon,—
The shadows rest upon the rocks.
The sun pours airy amber on
The withered wood-ways, where the late
Green-crickets’ shell-like wings vibrate:
And, fainter than lost lines of dawn,
The fields shine labyrinthed with rays,
With gossamer-webs, that imitate
Cloud-figments, or a splintered haze.
Beyond the yarrow’s meekness now,
Wood-sorrel’s lowliness, and shy
Hepatica’s humility,
The Year is grown: makes brave her brow
With crowning crimson of the lands,
And robes her limbs in cardinal dye,
And by the lonely waters stands.
XLI
Pure thought-creations of the mind,
Within the circle of the soul,—
The emanations that control
Life to its God-predestined goal,—
Are spirit shapes no flesh can bind:
Within the soul desire ordains
Achievements which the will constrains;
And far above us, on before,
Our thoughts—a beautiful people—soar,
To wait us on celestial plains.
So Nature pours her thoughts in forms—
Realities we move among—
Of fragrance, color, and of song;
Sense emanations which belong,
Invisible, to spiritual charms;
The sensuous substance of her thought
From immaterial matter wrought—
Matter, which death can not annul,
That constitutes the Beautiful,
And, dead, repeats itself from naught.
XLII
Give me the streams, that counterfeit
The twilight of autumnal skies;
The silent, shadowy waters, lit
With fire like a woman’s eyes!
Slow waters that, in autumn, glass
The scarlet-strewn and golden grass,
And drink the sunset’s tawny dyes.
Give me the pools, that lie among
The centuried forests! give me those,
Deep, dim, and sad as shadows hung
Dark ’neath the sunset’s sombre rose:
Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look—
Like ragged gipsies round a book
Of magic—trees in wild repose.