And thrid the heavenly orange-tree With orbits bright of minstrelsy.

If that I hate wild winter's spiteThe gibbet trees, the world in white, The sky but gray wind over a grave Why should I ache, the season's slave?

I'll sing from the top of the orange-tree Gramercy, winter's tyranny.

'I'll south with the sun, and keep my clime;
My wing is king of the summer-time;
My breast to the sun his torch shall hold;
And I'll call down through the green and
gold

Time, take thy scythe, reap bliss for me,
Bestir thee under the orange-tree.'

But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,

And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,

And the slant yellow beam down the woodaisle doth seem

Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,

Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,

And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke

Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,

And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,

And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,

30

That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the Marshes of Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore

When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,

And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain

Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, —

Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
The vast sweet visage of space.

To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,

Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,

For a mete and a mark
To the forest-dark :-
So:

Affable live-oak, leaning low,
Thus

40

- with your favor - soft, with a reverent hand

(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!),

Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand

On the firm-packed sand,

Free

By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.

Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band

Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land. 50 Inward and outward to northward and south

ward the beach-lines linger and curl

As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm sweet limbs of a girl. Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,

Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.

And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high? The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!

A league and a league of marsh-grass, waisthigh, broad in the blade,

Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,

Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
To the terminal blue of the main.

60

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.

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free

Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!

Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,

Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won

God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain

And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.

70

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the

watery sod,

Roll in on the souls of men,
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that
creep

Under the waters of sleep?

And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in

ness of God:

vellous marshes of Glynn.

1879.

THE REVENGE OF HAMISH

IT was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay;

And all of a sudden the sinister smell of

a man,

Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran Down the hillside and sifted along through the bracken and passed that way.