The full tide took you. You went out with the sun,
Not in the cringing ebb, not in the grey
And tremulous twilight, when each lonely one
To its last loneliness must creep away.
Your genius has won its rich repose,
Full laurelled, wearing still the unfaded rose.
And as those who bid good-bye at snowdrop time
Bear with them broken promises of Spring,
So you in triumph,—in the glory men had in you,
In Love's full worshipping,—
High summer thoughts, untouched of Winter's rime,
Went forth with honour, having fulfilled your Spring.
The hands that built you felt you flower from her prayer,
True to her vision true;
Fearless and fine, shaped from her fashioning;
Hands empty now, and yet not all unfilled,
Having built and fired the generous heart and brain,
Of the man you were; whose fervent spirit willed
You to the service and healing and help of men.
These things are hers, not to be lost nor changed
With changes of death; for though the body die
The golden deed is stamped eternally
With the head of God. The new and alien years
Leave it still bright, unaltered, unestranged.
Almost too proud, and too profound for tears
Is the high memory that the desolate heart
Shrines and is dumb, yet may for ever keep
Unforbidden, the imperishable part,
And what Love held, awake, he holds, asleep.
THE CLOUDBERRY.
Give me no coil of dæmon flowers—
Pale Messalines that faint and brood
Through the spent secret twilight hours
On their strange feasts of blood.
Give me wild things of moss and peat—
The gipsy flower that bravely goes,
The heather's little hard, brown feet,
And the black eyes of sloes.
But most of all the cloudberry
That offers in her clean, white cup
The melting snows—the cloudberry!
Where the great winds go up
To the hushed peak whose shadow fills
The air with silence calm and wide—
She lives, the Dian of the hills,
And the streams course beside.