Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/57

Faint scent of patchouli hung above it,
Of flowered silk and waxwhite prayers.

And the river took me—
The river which flowed through my dreams and which goes on still through my heart,
The masculine yellow Mississippi that the railroads had made forgotten,
The river of Spanish explorers, of canebrakes and floods, the pathway of strife that cut through the heart of my south.

I saw it once—I see it now forever.
For, with the next spring,
It was time to go.
Back to gray Europe
Shivering under the dark cloud that hung greedily poised above it.

Manhattan, opulent and daring, faded—
The broad-shaded southern town that I loved went out of existence—
The deep jade of the redwoods about San Francisco, the glowing fire of their trunks, disappeared from life,
The stony hillsides of New England, their sparse white farmhouses, followed—
The hard gray streets of Chicago running relentlessly forward into the wild blue lake,
These could not keep me back.

There dropped on them all the calm of a green-wooded harbour,
Terraced streets and belfry by the shore,
Skeleton clippers standing at attention
Amid a world at war.

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