Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/23

And ceased; and Nature's loneliness was there
That fills the desert where God talks with man.
Scarce was the soul reseated on her throne;
Still near the dark relapse he suffered doubt;
Still did he seem to seek remembered light,
With mortal senses wakened, seemed to hear
Some far-off rally of great souls in death
From fields of heroes fallen; and his gaze,
Loaded with all divine expectancy,
Was fastened as a spirit's where he saw
Those thunder-brows of storm; o'er him they loomed
Like mountains fanged, upon some desperate coast,
Whereto the sailor drifts with asking looks
And superstition; and upon him came
That strangeness round the heart that poets know,
And in the swift arrest of sleepless hope
Straightway he trembled; on that chain unloosed
The lightning burst in white and washing seas,
Pale-coursing floods; and, cloven with bolts oblique,
The vaporous summits swam in fiery air,
Chasm and cliff dividing; pass in pass,
Gulf after gulf, deep-trenched, interminable,