and beside them one may put this line of Lanier's,
"The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep,"*17*
because, as the context shows, he was
"Shaken with happiness:
The gates of sleep stood wide."*18*
And how naive and tender was this nature-worship! He speaks of the clover*19* and the clouds*20* as cousins, and of the leaves*21* as sisters, and in so doing reminds us of the earliest Italian poetry, especially of `The Canticle of the Sun', by St. Francis of Assisi, who brothers the wind, the fire, and the sun, and sisters the water, the stars, and the moon. Notice the tenderness in these lines of `Corn':
"The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart;"*22*
to which we find a beautiful parallel in a poem by Paul Hamilton Hayne, himself a reverent nature-worshiper:
"Ah! Nature seems
Through something sweeter than all dreams
To woo me; yea, she seems to speak
How closely, kindly, her fond cheek
Rested on mine, her mystic blood
Pulsing in tender neighborhood,
And soft as any mortal maid,
Half veiled in the twilight shade,
Who leans above her love to tell
Secrets almost ineffable!"*23*
Moreover, this worship is restful:
"Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.