Bloom, fervour, and perfume of grasses and flowers aglow, Breathe and brighten about me: the darkness gleams, The sweet light shivers and laughs on the slopes below, Made soft by leaves that lighten and change like dreams; The silence thrills with the whisper of secret streams That well from the heart of the woodland: these I know: Earth bore them, heaven sustained them with showers and beams. I lean my face to the heather, and drink the sun Whose flame-lit odour satiates the flowers: mine eyes Close, and the goal of delight and of life is one: No more I crave of earth or her kindred skies. No more? But the joy that springs from them smiles and flies: The sweet work wrought of them surely, the good work done, If the mind and the face of the season be loveless, dies. Thee, therefore, thee would I come to, cleave to, cling, If haply thy heart be kind and thy gifts be good, Unknown sweet spirit, whose vesture is soft in spring, In summer splendid, in autumn pale as the wood That shudders and wanes and shrinks as a shamed thing should, In winter bright as the mail of a war-worn king Who stands where foes fled far from the face of him stood. My spirit or thine is it, breath of thy life or of mine, Which fills my sense with a rapture that casts out fear? Pan's dim frown wanes, and his wild eyes brighten as thine, Transformed as night or as day by the kindling year. Earth-born, or mine eye were withered that sees, mine ear That hears were stricken to death by the sense divine, Earth-born I know thee: but heaven is about me here. The terror that whispers in darkness and flames in light, The doubt that speaks in the silence of earth and sea, The sense, more fearful at noon than in midmost night, Of wrath scarce hushed and of imminent ill to be, Where are they? Heaven is as earth, and as heaven to me Earth: for the shadows that sundered them here take flight; And nought is all, as am I, but a dream of thee. ON THE SOUTH COAST TO THEODORE WATTS Hills and valleys where April rallies his radiant squadron of flowers and birds, Steep strange beaches and lustrous reaches of fluctuant sea that the land engirds, Fields and downs that the sunrise crowns with life diviner than lives in words, Day by day of resurgent May salute the sun with sublime acclaim, Change and brighten with hours that lighten and darken, girdled with cloud or flame; Earth's fair face in alternate grace beams, blooms, and lowers, and is yet the same.