The night began the garden scents to steal;
The sea grew silver in the rising moon,
And violet the sky.
We looked on splendour that we did not feel;
Strange charms, to which our souls were not in tune,
Touched us and drifted by.
Then the wind rose and from the pines drew forth
Ancestral whispers of their land of birth,—
Dark heath and stormy shore;
And all the wistful magic of the north
And all the old enchantment of the earth
Enfolded us once more.
The north interpreted the south: dreams dreamed
In childhood gave reality its soul,
And filled the earth again
With vanished wonder; while far off I seemed
To hear wild seas beyond a pine-wood roll
At dusk in wind and rain.
INTERPENETRATIONS
Larks sang up in the morning sky,
Wild flowers shone in the dew:
The joy that dwells at the heart of things
The birds and the wild flowers knew.
The sea-waves broke on a lonely shore,
The wind went over the trees:
The sorrow that dwells at the heart of things
Was known to the winds and seas.
The sorrow borne on the wind’s song
The note of a bird made sweet;
And the broken song of the breaking waves
Seemed written in blue and golden staves
In the flowers that grew at our feet.
Secrets hid from the flowers of the field
In the wandering wind we heard;
And the stars of gold and the bells of blue
Of the wild flowers, gave us again the clue
That we missed in the song of the bird.
And something the winds and seas forgot
And the wild flowers left untold
Lay dim in the rose of the twilight sky
And shone in the starlight’s gold.
For the meaning that dwells in all things,
The story of every heart,
Is the same,—the infinite story of all
Whereof each telleth a part:—
Tidings mightier, graver,
Than a single voice can utter,
Too deep and solemn a secret
To sleep in a single breast;
But the voice of each makes truer
The voices of all the rest;
And each repeats of the story
The part that it loves the best.
LIFE AND LOVE
Weeds and flowers grow and die;
Sunlight never is withholden.
There were flowers long ago,
Others coming by and by:—
Do they for the light’s sake grow,
Or for their sake is it golden?
Hope and sorrow, joy and strife,
Years and pleasures new and olden
Leave us: Love alone has stayed.
Grew then Love because of Life?
Or was Love for Life’s sake made,
But for it were unbeholden?