Classic Poem

I.

Splendor on splendor moves the summer world,
Its days of beauty and its hours of thought
And lofty vision. Over fields unfurled
And these hushed woods with sunlit dreams inwrought
Comes life's far promise. He alone is not.
No more he comes, the grave, the wise, the kind,
To share as once of yore love's treasures of the mind.

How fills the silence with the year's great love,
This golden precinct of her liberties;
There is no breath in earth or heaven above,
Save stir of winds or whispering lisp of trees,
Or chirp of bird or murmurous drone of bees: —
In spirit might he stands alone with us,
To hark her under-song, so hushed, so tremulous!

This is the world he loved, this home of tree
And grass and flower and far unsounded sky:
His joy and quiet passion alone to be
Abroad with nature in her tranquillity,
When she nor all her train gave care a sigh: —
Far, far from life's loud thunder or its grief,
To stray in thought, alone, with flower and bud and leaf.

This was his world, his leafy summer home,
The woods he prized with quiet student eye.
But where is he who gazed upon the dome
Of unflecked heaven and let man's world go by;
Its strident note tumultuous, shrill and high,
And left the dreams of ermined Senate hall,
To note her sunbeams dance, her silvern waters fall?

Where hath he soared, to what far heights of dream?
Grave Summer sobs his name among her boughs;
And grieves him far by ocean loud, or stream,
Quiet of woodlands; where the shimmering brows
Of aspens fleck the waters with their snows,
Happy and laughing; or the vagrant wind
Haunts the high darkling wood like some unquiet mind.

So grieves or laughs the Summer; me alone,
Sadness unending and misty grief attends,
By sunny field and where his pine-trees moan,
Or soft conferring of his woodland friends: —
For me alone grey Sorrow her brow unbends,
And shows her eyes, those orbs whose haunted glooms
Hold ever in their depths the year's eternal dooms.

II.

O day of thought! O day of splendid dreams!
Where through these sunny glades the ghost winds walk,
Making a melody of the leafy gleams:
And overhead the ravens call and flock
To incantations, where the pine-trees rock; —
While far above from golden moorings high,
The sun's white ancient barges drift down the azure sky.

But he is gone. No more, no more, alas!
Will he revisit these familiar scenes
By peaceful haunts of waters or of grass;
No more amid the summer's gold and greens,
A shadow with the silent shadows pass,
Revolving inward thoughts of days to be,
As one who reads life's book of God's futurity.

III.

Wide walls of elm trees, etched against the skies!
Far lofty aisles of summer majesty!
Where cool at morn the wandering winds arise; —
Lean low your sighings to moan his death with me,
Whose life, high-reaching like a skyward tree,
Cut in the forenoon of its splendid prime,
Fell thundering on the slopes of shuddering time; —

Lean low and teach me of your summer peace,
A peace of heart that nature alone receives
From out the treasures of her love's increase:
Give me your balm of dreams and whispering leaves;
And all that magic mighty summer weaves
From out her shimmer and shade and inward dreams
Of deep embosomed woods and sunward glinting streams!

In thunders of trade the loud world moves along,
By granite avenues of its iron roar: —
And men, unmoved by melody of song,
Toil like poor ants to pile the world's great store
Of largesse rich by wave and sounding shore; —
Beauty and thought, unheeded, 'reft, alone,
Dream here unmindful of the world's far moan.

But he hath vanished, only yesterday,
'Mid rude alarm of earth's loud battle-drum,
And all the century's latest hours astray,
In doubt and mutterings of dread wars to come;
Now he, the strong, the wise, is stricken dumb.
At time's iron gates, while friend or foeman weeps,
Unmindful of our woe and strife of life, he sleeps.

IV.

Grey gates of memory and the mournful mind!
Dim aisles of sadness and of pensive thought!
Like touch of winter in the summer wind,
Your dream of life with dreams of death is fraught!
I feel your sadness though you murmur not,
Where flute your reveries in love's woodland tune,
Down hollow, golden slopes of haunted afternoon.

Here in your glades where sunbeams interlace,
My dreams are all for him who dreameth not,
Whose sleep is hidden in some sacred place,
Some solemn, lonely, love-devoted spot,
Dedicate to tears and saddened thought,
Where sleep the dead who rest remote alone,
Where Fundy's thundering surges beat their mighty monotone.

Here bide no sorrows, those grim shadowed glooms,
Those sleepless torturers of the human mind,
Alien to these luminous leafy rooms,
Whose only tenant is the laughing wind
Mindless of the days and hours behind,
Wandering 'mid boughs and blossoms tremulous,
Dead to all earth's ills and griefs that torture us.

V.

This cool, sweet, summer-breathing Sabbath morn,
The very winds of heaven are filled with peace;
Such restfulness upon their wings is borne
Of motion wherein action seems to cease; —
And life breathes on its slow-drawn measured lease; —
Low sighing airs, cool skies, and lisping leaves,
A summer lute whereon the stately season grieves.

On such a morn, enisled in summer dreams,
All sadness sinks to peace; a peace that holds
The spirit in a trance as fields and streams
Are held within the day's dim shining folds;
And as these woodlands in their greens and golds
Stand hushed in trance of wind and leaf and bird:
So we, too, stand and hark for nature's larger word.

And it is meet that here in such an hour,
When all the world is tuned to love's low psalm,
The heart should dream of him whose spirit's power,
Whose whole true strength was islanded in calm,
Like some reef-island of far summered palm,
Hidden in peace from out those ruder seas
Where rage the baser hates of life's mad destinies.

So wrapt in strength he garnered from within,
So isolate in peace he stood apart,
A solitary headland in the din
And maddened roar of all our angered mart,
Alien from the mob and mad upstart,
Serene and reticent, from all the world
Of party-strife and its loud passions hurled: —

A hater of that sordid horde who sneak
And cringe and crawl to favor's lap unclean;
A silent patriot not afraid to speak
The saner word amid the mobs of spleen,
He stood alone, and chose that golden mean
Of wisdom's place 'twixt each extremity
Of brutal bigot spite and blind antipathy.

So like this limpid morning grew his life,
So calm and temperate, kindly, grave, contained,
It cannot be that all this peace is rife,
And he alone in wintry silence chained;
Who ne'er perforce a single spirit pained,
Whose quaint grave wisdom gladdened in his look,
Should now be blind and dumb like wintry, prisoned brook!

Peace! peace! my spirit! let not misery rave,
That he who left us holds untimely tryst
With shrouded death in June's untimely grave;
Though Love her bright wings darkens into mist,
With hope's eternal radiance death is kissed: —
Peace! peace! he lives yet in our highest dreams,
In every leafy, upward life, in every bud that gleams!

VI.

He sleeps alone by Fundy's thundering shore,
He sleeps, though heedless, unforgotten he,
Who loved earth's mystery ever more and more,
And yearned to pierce her veiled infinity;
He sleeps to-day unshackled, franchised, free,
To wander where she wills him, she who gave
And took to her again by sedge and sounding wave.

He sleeps, and dreaming, chance in dreams he may; —
If nature builds anew or holds unchanged
That fragile mystery clothed erstwhile in clay,
The human mind; whose wondrous vision ranged
The universe of life and thought unchanged; —
Soar to some morn, beyond these veiled skies,
And dusks of our poor night, and all its vague surmise.

I grieve, but not alone, the whole earth grieves
For him and all hushed souls who fare alone,
Reaped and bound as autumn-garnered sheaves,
Unto that harvest of the dim unknown: —
I grieve, but not in vain, as clouds are blown,
By sun and wind aside till heaven looks through; —
So some far shining hope illumines grief's dim dew.

From here by lone Ottawa's dreaming bank,
To where he sleeps by his loved Fundy's tide,
Unheeding, where the seabirds, rank on rank,
Circle forever where the sea-winds ride: —
A thread of memory doth forever bide
Of those who knew and loved him in his prime,
Till memory fades and fails in some dim after-time; —

Then men may question, gazing on his tomb,
Who was this spirit of an earlier day?
And chance, still lingering in the aftergloom,
This sombre verse revivify his clay:
And teach men of his worthiness to stay
In memory and honor as of one
Who passed, untimely, ere his weird was spun.

This lover of earth's grave wisdom; in the man
He prized it dearer than in lore of page;
And dwelt in spirit with that rarer clan,
The seer, the bard, the prophet and the sage,
Who dream the purer dreams of each new age,
And build anew hope's citadels of time,
In granite of grim thought, or mists of airy rhyme.

Still dreams Ottawa, 'twixt his country ways,
The roar of cities and the haste of men; —
And far-off Fundy thunders through his haze
A grief more sad than woe of poet's pen,
And wakes the sea-wolf in his craggy den,
And lifts his mists and brims his tides afar,
To lave the shining wastes of haunted Tantramar!

I grieve, but sorrow lightens; Love, all-wise,
Hath ne'er made earth a charnel-house for tears: —
Even as I dream, the morning drapes his skies
In glories far by golden woods and meres,
And builds a wondrous bastion round my fears;
While loosen the winds, their shining wings unfurled,
And God's great purpose compasses the world.