V.
Week after week slipped billowy by into the gulfy past,
And the silvery beryl of each day’s wave broke at Kyrle’s feet and upcast
Flotsam of Indian broideries, spices, and pearls of Ceylon,
Sandalwood Araby sweet, and myrrh, and fagots of cinnamon,
And strewing the sterile waste beach of his life became as a godsend thereon.
The timid grace of the lady birch, the gnarls of the oak, she told,
How the warrior pines stood stark against the sunset’s daffodil gold,
And the sinuous slopes of the distant hills were but as a banner unscrolled,
Tawny and russet and purple twined, dotted with orbs of jet
Where a sturdy thorn or a lichened rock was into the fabric set,
And often she pictured a mother and babes, a tranquil domestic scene
Behind the rubious cordial glow of a casement’s coppery sheen,
And once when the sky occidental was paly translucentest green,
Like apple-tree buds ere the mid-May’s kiss quickens them, tender and keen,
She told how a trio of cloudy shapes, dripping with blood and wine,
Drifted o’er the horizon’s rim, lurid as almandine,
Huddled and hunched and wizened, like the sisters three in Macbeth,
And one was Failure and one was Fear, and one was a Prayer for death,—
But an airy knight pricked over the plain and he vanquished them all at a breath,
And the conqueror’s colors were caught and tossed, and up to the zenith rolled,
And a legion sang of his victory like the morning stars of old.
And once she came through a shuddering storm, braving the eddying whirl
Of the snow-grains sown by a prodigal hand, and walked for a space with Kyrle,
And clung to his arm, half womanly guide, and half but a frivolous girl,
And said ’twas as if they were walking alone, they two, in a vast white pearl,
Where radiant nacre-gleams of pink traversed the edelweiss hue,
But never a satyr’s hoof was heard nor an Oread’s laugh rang through,
And there lurked no hint of the forestal green nor yet of the limitless blue.
And then as they battled against the wind, sauntering to and fro,
She preached him a little sermon she had studied that day in Thoreau,
Her text, the chariot wheels of the storm, the six-spoked crystals of snow,
Those faceted glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven’s floor,
Feathery petaled hexagonal flowers, diamond dusted o’er,—
Why, we are sprent with gems! they fall in a wavering thistledown blur,
In the gallery of the meadow mouse, on the restless squirrel’s fur,
The schoolboy crushes them into a ball, the woodman follows his sled
Through the wreck of a myriad fragile stars, strange as the stars o’erhead,—
And Oh! ’twere a blasphemy to declare by some cold narrowing word
Mechanical action got them: Divinity must have stirred
In the germ pellucid and gelid, and so have they come to be
Fair fruit of enthusiasm, the children of ecstasy,—
And mother nature not yet had lost her pristine vigor and force,
Still was the law supreme at work, the sun still true in his course,
And God still paused to watch over His earth, still fashioned with cunningest art
The baby flakes of the silver snow—and why should a man lose heart?
