TO THE RIDEAU RIVER.
You wander, shining, down all happy places, You kiss the over-airs with misty lips, You mirror in your depths all earth’s glad faces, While low to you in love the heaven dips.
About you gather all the loves of summer, You sing glad morning and tired eve to sleep, Lifting your cooling cup to each new comer, Till hearts grow strong where life was at its neap.
O river, glad and bounteous in your singing, So restful and continuous night and day, You seem to voice the feathered creatures winging, And little children in their joyous play.
You bring to earth a long-lost, olden beauty, When filling summer with your slumb’rous sound; You banish stress and strife and barren duty, Brimming with joyance all the world around.
I gaze upon your shining face at morning, When woods are fresh and dews are on the grass; And light and love, the night and darkness scorning, Fill earth with song from each bush where I pass.
I gaze upon your misty face at even, Athwart the golden chambers of the west, When ever-changing glories of the heaven Build up a broken splendour in thy breast.
And when the misty moon, in pallid glory, Glimmers across the ghost-lagoons of night, Within your breast there haunts the spectre story Of her pale loves and dreams in tremulous light.
Across the peace of all the night’s great healing, Beneath the silence of the dark’s hushed deep, A phosphorescent, ghostly spirit stealing, You softly slide, a sleep within a sleep.