Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/90

O memory-haunted eyes, that learned the light
On springtime pastures of his youth, when first,
Sweet in his blood, the bud of boyhood broke
Wide-open to the dalliance of the morn!
But here no change of season met his view,
Nor hint of birth or death; eternal seemed
The summer air, the landscape, and the sky,
And beauty without alteration found.
Before him a wide river-bottom lay,
Smooth as a floor, where clumps of elm and oak
Opened obscure and nameless solitudes,
Bathing in dawn; in undiscovered lands
Sweep such vast floods amid the fragrant wild,
And wander many a forest-mantled league
Unlooked on, till the lost explorer come,
Tracking his hopes. There plunged the Roamer down
In that far country, sunken in the West;
And all along the steep precipitous
The mobile scene made pictures as he went,
That borrowed nothing from the poet's eye;
The landscape recomposed at every step
With change kaleidoscopic, ever new,
And crag, and pass, and vistas opening heaven
Cast dreaming beauty in that air divine,
Like shadows in the stream of being flung.