Waving from green zone to zone,
Over wonders of its own;
Trackless, untraversed, unknown,

Changeless through the centuries.

Who can say what thing it bears?

Blazing bird and blooming flower, Dwelling there for years and years,

Hold the enchanted secret theirs: Life and death and dream have made Mysteries in many a shade,

Hollow haunt and hidden bower
Closed alike to sun and shower.

Who is ruler of each race

Living in each boundless place,
Growing, flowering, and flying,
Glowing, revelling, and dying?
Wave-like, palm by palm is stirr'd,
And the bird sings to the bird,
And the day sings one rich word,
And the great night comes replying

Long red reaches of the cane,
Yellow winding water-lane,

Verdant isle and amber river,
Lisp and murmur back again,

And ripe under-worlds deliver Rapturous souls of perfume, hurl'd

Up to where green oceans quiver In the wide leaves' restless world.

Many thousand years have been,
And the sun alone hath seen,

Like a high and radiant ocean,
All the fair palm world in motion;

But the crimson bird hath fed

With its mate of equal red,

And the flower in soft explosion

With the flower hath been wed.

And its long luxuriant thought
Lofty palm to palm hath taught,
While a single vast liana

All one brotherhood hath wrought,
Crossing forest and savannah,
Binding fern and coco-tree,

Fig-tree, buttress-tree, banana,

I warf cane and tall marití.

A. O'Shaughnessy

XXX

WINTER

I, singularly moved

To love the lovely that are not beloved,

Of all the Seasons, most

Love Winter, and to trace

The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.

It is not death, but plenitude of peace;

And the dim cloud that does the world enfold

Hath less the characters of dark and cold

Than warmth and light asleep,

And correspondent breathing seems to keep
With the infant harvest, breathing soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.

Nor is in field or garden anything

But, duly look'd into, contains serene

The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,

And evidence of Summer not yet seen.

On every chance-mild day

That visits the moist shaw,

The honeysuckle, 'sdaining to be crost

In urgence of sweet life by sleet or frost, 'Voids the time's law

With still increase

Of leaflet new, and little, wandering spray;
Often, in sheltering brakes,

As one from rest disturb'd in the first hour,
Primrose or violet bewilder'd wakes,

And deems 'tis time to flower;

Though not a whisper of her voice he hear,
The buried bulb does know

The signals of the year,

And hails far Summer with his lifted spear.

C. Patmore

XXXI

LYNMOUTH

Around my love and me the brooding hills,
Full of delicious murmurs, rise on high,
Closing upon this spot the summer fills,
And over which there rules the summer sky.

Behind us on the shore down there the sea
Roars roughly, like a fierce pursuing hound;
But all this hour is calm for her and me;

And now another hill shuts out the sound.

And now we breathe the odours of the glen,
And round about us are enchanted things;
The bird that hath blithe speech unknown to men,
The river keen, that hath a voice and sings.

The tree that dwells with one ecstatic thought,
Wider and fairer growing year by year,
The flower that flowereth and knoweth nought,
The bee that scents the flower and draweth near.

Our path is here, the rocky winding ledge

That sheer o'erhangs the rapid shouting stream;
Now dips down smoothly to the quiet edge,
Where restful waters lie as in a dream.

The green exuberant branches overhead
Sport with the golden magic of the sun,
Here quite shut out, here like rare jewels shed
To fright the glittering lizards as they run.

And wonderful are all those mossy floors

Spread out beneath us in some pathless place, Where the sun only reaches and outpours

His smile, where never a foot hath left a trace.

And there are perfect nooks that have been made

By the long growing tree, through some chance turn Its trunk took; since transform'd with scent and shade And fill'd with all the glory of the fern.

And tender-tinted wood flowers are seen,

Clear starry blooms and bells of pensive blue,
That lead their delicate lives there in the green--
What were the world if it should lose their hue?

Even o'er the rough out-jutting stone that blocks
The narrow way some cunning hand hath strewn
The moss in rich adornment, and the rocks
Down there seem written thick with many a rune.
And here, upon that stone, we rest awhile,
For we can see the lovely river's fall,
And wild and sweet the place is to beguile
My love, and keep her till I tell her all.

A. O'Shaughnessy

XXXII

THE SONG OF EMPEDOCLES

And you, ye stars,

Who slowly begin to marshal,

As of old, in the fields of heaven,

Your distant, melancholy lines!

Have you, too, survived yourselves?

Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You, too, once lived;

You too moved joyfully

Among august companions,

In an older world, peopled by Gods,

In a mightier order,

The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven.

But now, ye kindle

Your lonely, cold-shining lights,
Unwilling lingerers

In the heavenly wilderness,
For a younger, ignoble world;
And renew, by necessity,
Night after night your courses,
In echoing, unnear'd silence,
Above a race you know not-
Uncaring and undelighted,
Without friend and without home;
Weary like us, though not

Weary with our weariness.

M. Arnold

XXXIII

THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;
Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,

And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,

And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green,

Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest !

Here, where the reaper was at work of late-
In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves
His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,
And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,
Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to

use

Here will I sit and wait,

While to my ear from uplands far away

The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn-

All the live murmur of a summer's day.