LEFT OUT.

OVER parched hill and plain
Sweep the legions of the rain.
Here its bounty knows no stay,
Here in showers it ebbs away,
Here unslaked the summer burns ;
Downward to the mother turns
Choicest flower of all the fields,
With a sigh its spirit yields.
may blame the rain or no,

You

But it ever hath been so :
Something loveliest of its race
Perisheth from out its place,
For the lack of freshening care,
While the rain pours otherwhere.

From the caverned shores and seas
Springs the wafting sail-loved breeze;
To its port speeds many a bark,
Like an arrow to the mark.
Here a zephyr's might it blows,
Here the sea unruffled flows;
Here is held with sails asleep
Swiftest ship that swept the deep.

You

LEFT OUT.

may blame the wind or no,

But it ever hath been so :
Something bravest of its kind
Leads a frustrate life and blind,
For the lack of favoring gales,
Blowing blithe on other sails.

21

SPIRIT TO SPIRIT.

DEAD? Not to thee, thou keen watcher,

not viewless, to thee,

not silent,

Immortal still wrapped in the mortal! I, from the mortal set free,

Greet thee by many clear tokens thou smilest to hear and to see.

For I, when thou wakest at dawn, to thee am the entering morn;

And I, when thou walkest abroad, am the dew on the leaf and the thorn,

The tremulous glow of the noon, the twilight on harvests of corn.

I am the flower by the wood-path,

look in my eyes;

The bird in its nest in the thicket,

love-laden cries;

thou liftest

The planet that leads the night legions,

thy gaze to the skies.

And I am the soft-dropping rain, the snow with its

fluttering swarms ;

SPIRIT TO SPIRIT.

23

The summer-day cloud on the hilltops, that showeth thee manifold forms;

The wind from the south and the west, the voice that sings courage in storms!

Sweet was the earth to thee ever, but sweeter by far to thee now:

How hast thou room for tears, when all times marvelest

thou,

Beholding who dwells with God in the blossoming sward and the bough!

Once as a wall were the mountains, once darkened between us the sea;

No longer these thwart and baffle, forbidding my passage to thee:

Immortal still wrapped in the mortal, I linger till thou art set free!

AT DEATH'S DOOR.

BELOVED, thou wouldst question me
What things the parting soul doth see.

That moment of the still, gray prime
When, fleeing from the house of time,

The spirit through mine eyelids passed (Thy kisses sealed those windows last),

I touched, obscure, a threshold stone,
A Door I reached, spent and alone.

All void before, my spirit then
Turned on the past its doubtful ken.

Along the road I had o'ergone,
A tenfold light began to dawn.

Each day of life revealed stood,
Each with its dower of ill or good;

And deed, and thought, and flitting dream, Showed clear as mote in sunny beam.