dream

All the night in woe,
Lyca's parents go:
Over vallies deep.
While the desarts weep.

Tired and woe-begone.
Hoarse with making moan:
Arm in arm seven days.
They trac'd the desert ways.

Seven nights they sleep.
Among shadows deep:
And dream they see their child
Starvdd in desart wild.

Pale thro' pathless ways
The fancied image strays.
Famish'd, weeping, weak
With hollow piteous shriek

Rising from unrest,
The trembling woman prest,
With feet of weary woe;

Since I have come to years sedate
I see with more and more acumen
The bitter irony of Fate,
The vanity of all things human.
Why, just to-day some fellow said,
As I surveyed Fame's outer portal:
"By gad! I thought that you were dead."
Poor me, who dreamed to be immortal!

But that's the way with many men
Whose name one fancied time-defying;
We thought that they were dust and then
We found them living by their dying.
Like dogs we penmen have our day,
To brief best-sellerdom elected;

Light on the towns and cities, and peace for evermore!
The Big Five met in the world's light as many had met before,
And the future of man is settled and there shall be no more war.

The lamb shall lie down with the lion, and trust with treachery;
The brave man go with the coward, and the chained mind shackle the free,
And the truthful sit with the liar ever by land and sea.

And there shall be no more passion and no more love nor hate;
No more contempt for the paltry, no more respect for the great;

Some say the spot is banned; that the pillar Cross-and-Hand
   Attests to a deed of hell;
But of else than of bale is the mystic tale
   That ancient Vale-folk tell.

Ere Cernel's Abbey ceased hereabout there dwelt a priest,
   (In later life sub-prior
Of the brotherhood there, whose bones are now bare
   In the field that was Cernel choir).

One night in his cell at the foot of yon dell
   The priest heard a frequent cry:
"Go, father, in haste to the cot on the waste,

The lords of life, the lords of life,-
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name;-
Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look:-
Him by the hand dear nature took;

All the heights of the high shores gleam
   Red and gold at the sunset hour:
There comes the spell of a magic dream,
   And the Harbour seems a lotus-flower;

A blue flower tinted at dawn with gold,
   A broad flower blazing with light at noon,
A flower forever with charms to hold
   His heart, who sees it by sun or moon.

Its beauty burns like a ceaseless fire,
   And tower looks over the top of tower;
For all mute things it would seem, aspire
   To catch a glimpse of the lotus-flower.

"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,

NOT in the sky,
Where it was seen
So long in eminence of light serene,—
Nor on the white tops of the glistering wave,
Nor down in mansions of the hidden deep,
Though beautiful in green
And crystal, its great caves of mystery,—
Shall the bright watcher have
Her place, and, as of old, high station keep!

Gone! gone!
Oh! nevermore, to cheer
The mariner, who holds his course alone
On the Atlantic, through the weary night,
When the stars turn to watchers, and do sleep,

It is dusk on the Lost Lagoon,
And we two dreaming the dusk away,
Beneath the drift of a twilight grey,
Beneath the drowse of an ending day,
And the curve of a golden moon.

It is dark in the Lost Lagoon,
And gone are the depths of haunting blue,
The grouping gulls, and the old canoe,
The singing firs, and the dusk and--you,
And gone is the golden moon.

O! lure of the Lost Lagoon,--
I dream to-night that my paddle blurs
The purple shade where the seaweed stirs,

I broider the world upon a loom,
I broider with dreams my tapestry;
Here in a little lonely room
I am master of earth and sea,
And the planets come to me.

I broider my life into the frame,
I broider my love, thread upon thread;
The world goes by with its glory and shame,
Crowns are bartered and blood is shed;
I sit and broider my dreams instead.

And the only world is the world of my dreams,
And my weaving the only happiness;
For what is the world but what it seems?