There dwells a spirit in the budding year— As motherhood doth beautify the face— That even lends these barren glebes a grace, And fills grey hours with beauty that were drear And bleak when the loud, storming March was here: A glamour that the thrilled heart dimly traces In swelling boughs and soft, wet, windy spaces, And sunlands where the chattering birds make cheer.
I thread the uplands where the wind’s footfalls Stir leaves in gusty hollows, autumn’s urns. Seaward the river’s shining breast expands, High in the windy pines a lone crow calls, And far below some patient ploughman turns His great black furrow over steaming lands.
IN A JUNE NIGHT.
See how the luminous night hath drawn around The curtains of her majesty, and o’er The far-heard, murmurous sounds of earthly life Hath dropped the mantle of her misty sleep, That spreads itself and folds the corners in Of darkness round this hid rim of the world.
O Beauty, thou art never half so rare And restful to the spirit as when thou Dost throne thyself amid the dome of night, The deep blue zenith that is scarcely blue, Where darkness scarce takes color, and the arch Of heaven glows with myriad misty fires, That move like spirits in majestic space, And fill with inward music the great void That tunes itself to match the seraphim, And lifts the heart of man to higher planes Of strength and greatness. I have seen thy face At kindling morning or at dreamy eve, Or mid the pauses of a summer noon, When thou didst glass thee in a woodland pool, Where sound was far, and all the world a dream.
And I have hunted thee down autumn lanes, Dream-avenues of mists and ruddy fires, Past the complainings of the thoughtful wind, That in the under-heart of woodlands moaned, And jargoned memories of the haunted past.
Or I have seen thy presence in the storm, The quick, mad muttering of the thunder-cloud, That zigzagged all the ashen fields with red, Followed by the sudden rushing rain, That roared the roof-tops and the window-panes, And threshed the grain-fields and the garden flowers, And flooded the dusty roads with pools and streams, While all the heaven brimmed with fire and rain: Then darkened past and left the summer sky As stainless as the blue eye of a child; And all the world alit with trembling gems, Beneath the sunlight and the cooling air.
Or I have seen thine awfuller majesty In mad November, when his muffled storms, Loud-tongued and mighty, racked the skeleton woods, And roared and surged amid the branchy tops, Like some far surf of ocean on his shore, Hounding the frosts from their still fastness there. Or in the frosty silence of deep snows And long-drawn, silent nights of weeping winds, Crooning a tune amid the skeleton trees; Thy spirit hath made music in my heart.