No more we hear the turbulent traffic,
Not scorned but unremembered is the day;
The Night, all luminous and seraphic,
Has brushed its heavy memories away.
The great blue Night so clear and kindly,
The little stars so wide-eyed and so still,
Open a door for souls that blindly
Had wandered, tunnelling the endless hill;
They draw the long-untraversed portal,
Our souls slip out and tremble and expand,
The immortal feels for the immortal,
The eternal holds the eternal by the hand.
Impalpably we are led and lifted,
Softly we shake into the gulf of blue,
The last environing veil is rifted
And lost horizons float into our view.
Lost lands, lone seas, lands that afar gleam
With a miraculous beauty, faint yet clear,
Forgotten lands of night and star-gleam,
Seas that are somewhere but that are not here.
Borne without effort or endeavour,
Swifter and more ethereal than the wind,
In level track we stream, whilst ever
The fair pale panorama rolls behind.
Now fleets below a trancèd moorland,
A sweep of glimmering immobility;
Now craggy cliff and dented foreland
Pass back and there beyond unfolds the sea.
Now wastes of water heaving, drawing,
Great darkling tracts of patterned restlessness,
With whitened waves round rough rocks mawing
And licking islands in their fierce caress.
Now coasts with capes and ribboned beaches
Set silent 'neath the canopy sapphirine,
And estuaries and river reaches.
Phantasmal silver in the night's soft shine.
*****