And lavishly beneath the sun,
In liberal splendour rolled,
The fennel fills the dipping plain
With floods of flowery gold;
And widely weaves the iron-weed
A woof of purple dyes
Where Autumn's royal feet may tread
When bankrupt Summer flies.
In verdurous tumult far away
The prairie-billows gleam;
Upon their crests in blessing rests
The noontide's gracious beam.
Low quivering vapours steaming dim
The level splendours break
Where languid lilies deck the rim
Of some land-circled lake.
Far in the East like low-hung clouds
The waving woodlands lie;
Far in the West the glowing plain
Melts warmly in the sky.
No accent wounds the reverent air,
No footprint dints the sod-
Lone in the light the prairie lies,
Rapt in a dream of God.
[Born about 1833.1 Miss Larcom is authoress of a volume of Poems published in 1869].
"INTO the sunshine out of shade!"
The rill has heard the call,
And, babbling low, her answer made,—
A laugh, 'twixt slip and fall.
Out from her cradle-roof of trees,
Over the free, rough ground!
The peaceful blue above she sees;
The cheerful green around.
A pleasant world for running streams
To steal unnoticed through,
At play with all the sweet sky-gleams,
And nothing else to do!
A rock has stopped the silent rill,
And taught her how to speak :
He hinders her; she chides him still;
He loves her lispings weak.
And still he will not let her go:
But she may chide and sing,
And o'er him liquid freshness throw,
Amid her murmuring.
The harebell sees herself no more
In waters clear at play;
Yet never she such azure wore,
Till wept on by the spray.
1 I must apologize for guessing at a lady's age. My surmise is based partly (but not solely) on the fact that Miss Larcom's poem, Thirty-five, which seems to relate to herself, is printed in her volume dated 1869.-W. M. R.
And many a woodland violet
Stays charmed upon the bank;
Her thoughtful blue eye brimming wet,
The rock and rill to thank.
The rill is blessing in her talk
What half she held a wrong,-
The happy trouble of the rock
That makes her life a song.
THOU mayst not rest in any lovely thing,
Thou, who wert formed to seek and to aspire;
For no fulfilment of thy dreams can bring
The answer to thy measureless desire.
The beauty of the round green world is not
Of the world's essence; far within the sky
The tints which make this bubble bright are wrought:
The bubble bursts; the light can never die.
Thou canst not make a pillow for thy head
Of anything so brittle and so frail;
Yet mayst thou by its transient glow be led
Into the heaven where sun and star grow pale;
Where out of burning whiteness flows the light-
Light, which is but the visible stream of love;
Hope's ladder brightening upward through the night,
Whereon our feet grow wingèd as they move.
Let beauty sink in light; in central deeps
Of love unseen let dearest eyes grow dim:
They draw us after, up the infinite steeps
Where souls familiar track the seraphim.
THE ROSE ENTHRONED.
IT melts and seethes, the chaos that shall grow
To adamant beneath the house of life;
In hissing hatred atoms clash, and go
To meet intenser strife.
And, ere that fever leaves the granite veins,
Down thunders over them a torrid sea:
Now Flood, now Fire, alternate despot reigns,
Immortal foes to be.
Built by the warring elements, they rise,
The massive earth-foundations, tier on tier,
Where slimy monsters with unhuman eyes
Their hideous heads uprear.
The building of the world is not for you,
That glare upon each other, and devour:
Race floating after race fades out of view,
Till Beauty springs from Power.
Meanwhile from crumbling rocks and shoals of death
Shoots up rank verdure to the hidden sun;
The gulfs are eddying to the vague, sweet breath
Of richer life begun ;
Richer and sweeter far than aught before,
Though rooted in the grave of what has been.
Unnumbered burials yet must heap Earth's floor
Ere she her heir shall win;
And ever nobler lives and deaths more grand,
For nourishment of that which is to come;
While mid the ruins of the work she planned
Sits Nature, blind and dumb.
For whom or what she plans she knows no more
Than any mother of her unborn child :
Yet beautiful forewarnings murmur o'er
Slowly the clamour and the clash subside; Earth's restlessness her patient hopes subdue; Mild oceans shoreward heave a pulse-like tide; The skies are veined with blue.
And life works through the growing quietness,
To bring some darling mystery into form:
Beauty her fairest Possible would dress
In colours pure and warm.
Within the depths of palpitating seas
A tender tint,-anon a line of grace
Some lovely thought from its dull atom frees,
The coming joy to trace :-
A pencilled moss on tablets of the sand,
Such as shall veil the unbudded maiden-blush Of beauty yet to gladden the green land;A breathing, through the hush,
Of some sealed perfume longing to burst out,
And give its prisoned rapture to the air ;-
A brooding hope, a promise through a doubt,
Is whispered everywhere.
And, every dawn a shade more clear, the skies
A flush as from the heart of heaven disclose: Through earth and sea and air a message flies, Prophetic of the Rose.
At last a morning comes, of sunshine still,
When not a dewdrop trembles on the grass, When all winds sleep, and every pool and rill Is like a burnished glass
Where a long looked-for guest might lean to gaze;
When Day on Earth rests royally,—a crown
Of molten glory, flashing diamond rays,
From heaven let lightly down.
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