Come away! come away! -- for the scenes we leave behind us Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that's young forever; And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind, That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains. The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us, And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years; But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman's eyes. _Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us -- Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: -- Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us, And a warm hearth waits for us within._ Come away! come away! -- or the roving-fiend will hold us, And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring: There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them, There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother. So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: -- The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it, And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see. _Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us -- Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes, And the long fall wind on the lake._ Octaves I To get at the eternal strength of things, And fearlessly to make strong songs of it, Is, to my mind, the mission of that man The world would call a poet. He may sing But roughly, and withal ungraciously; But if he touch to life the one right chord Wherein God's music slumbers, and awake To truth one drowsed ambition, he sings well. II We thrill too strangely at the master's touch; We shrink too sadly from the larger self Which for its own completeness agitates And undetermines us; we do not feel -- We dare not feel it yet -- the splendid shame Of uncreated failure; we forget, The while we groan, that God's accomplishment Is always and unfailingly at hand. III To mortal ears the plainest word may ring Fantastic and unheard-of, and as false And out of tune as ever to our own Did ring the prayers of man-made maniacs; But if that word be the plain word of Truth, It leaves an echo that begets itself, Persistent in itself and of itself, Regenerate, reiterate, replete. IV