Chapter X

O you who forth along the highway ride,
Whose quest the whispering wood shall close around,
Be all adventure high that may betide,
And gentle all enchantments therein found!
I would my song were as a trumpet-sound
To nerve you and speed, and weld its notes with power
To the remembrance of your perfect hour;
To ring again and again, and to recall
With the might of music, all:
The prescience proud, the morning aspiration,
But most the unuttered vow, the inward consecration!

THE ENCOUNTER

There’s a wood-way winding high,
Roofed far up with light-green flicker,
Save one midmost star of sky.
Underfoot ’tis all pale brown
With the dead leaves matted down
One on other, thick and thicker;
Soft, but springing to the tread.
There a youth late met a maid
Running lightly,--oh, so fleetly!
“Whence art thou?” the herd-boy said.
Either side her long hair swayed,
Half a tress and half a braid,
Coloured like the soft dead leaf.
As she answered, laughing sweetly,
On she ran, as flies the swallow;
He could not choose but follow
Though it had been to his grief.

“I have come up from the valley,--
From the valley!” Once he caught her,
Swerving down a sidelong alley,
For a moment, by the hand.
“Tell me, tell me,” he besought her,
“Sweetest, I would understand
Why so cold thy palm, that slips
From me like the shy cold minnow?
The wood is warm, and smells of fern,
And below the meadows burn.
Hard to catch and hard to win, oh!
Why are those brown finger tips
Crinkled as with lines of water?”

Laughing while she featly footed,
With the herd-boy hasting after,
Sprang she on a trunk uprooted,
Clung she by a roping vine;
Leaped behind a birch, and told,
Still eluding, through its fine,
Mocking, slender, leafy laughter,
Why her finger tips were cold:

“I went down to tease the brook,
With her fishes, there below;
She comes dancing, thou must know,
And the bushes arch above her;
But the seeking sunbeams look,
Dodging, through the wind-blown cover,
Find and kiss her into stars.
Silvery veins entwine and crook
Where a stone her tripping bars;
There be smooth, clear sweeps, and swirls
Bubbling up crisp drops like pearls.
There I lie, along the rocks
Thick with greenest slippery moss,
And I have in hand a strip
Of gray, pliant, dappled bark;
And I comb her liquid locks
Till her tangling currents cross;
And I have delight to hark
To the chiding of her lip,
Taking on the talking stone
With each turn another tone.
Oh, to set her wavelets bickering!
Oh, to hear her laughter simple,
See her fret and flash and dimple!
Ha, ha, ha!” The woodland rang
With the rippling through the flickering.
At the birch the herd-boy sprang.

On a sudden something wound
Vine-like round his throbbing throat;
On a sudden something smote
Sharply on his longing lips,
Stung him as the birch bough whips:
Was it kiss or was it blow?
Never after could he know;
She was gone without a sound.

Never after could he see
In the wood or in the mead,
Or in any company
Of the rustic mortal maids,
Her with acorn-coloured braids;
Never came she to his need.
Never more the lad was merry,
Strayed apart, and learned to dream,
Feeding on the tart wild berry;
Murmuring words none understood,--
Words with music of the wood,
And with music of the stream.

FLOWER FANCIES

I

A YELLOW PANSY

To the wall of the old green garden
A butterfly quivering came;
His wings on the sombre lichens
Played like a yellow flame.

He looked at the gray geraniums,
And the sleepy four-o’-clocks;
He looked at the low lanes bordered
With the glossy-growing box.

He longed for the peace and the silence,
And the shadows that lengthened there,
And his wee wild heart was weary
Of skimming the endless air.

And now in the old green garden,--
I know not how it came,--
A single pansy is blooming,
Bright as a yellow flame.

And whenever a gay gust passes,
It quivers as if with pain,
For the butterfly-soul that is in it
Longs for the winds again!

II

THE SPRING BEAUTIES

The Puritan Spring Beauties stood freshly clad for church;
A Thrush, white-breasted, o’er them sat singing on his perch.
“Happy be! for fair are ye!” the gentle singer told them,
But presently a buff-coat Bee came booming up to scold them.
“Vanity, oh, vanity!
Young maids, beware of vanity!”
Grumbled out the buff-coat Bee,
Half parson-like, half soldierly.

The sweet-faced maidens trembled, with pretty, pinky blushes,
Convinced that it was wicked to listen to the Thrushes;
And when, that shady afternoon, I chanced that way to pass,
They hung their little bonnets down and looked into the grass.
All because the buff-coat Bee
Lectured them so solemnly:--
“Vanity, oh, vanity!
Young maids, beware of vanity!”