Now lifted up, intense and still, Sprung from the silence of the hill He hangs upon the ledge a-glisten, And his whole body seems to listen! My pages give a little start, And he is gone! to be a part Of the old cedar’s crumpled bark, A mottled scar, a weather-mark! How halt am I, how mean of birth, Beside this darting pulse of earth! I only have the wit to look Into a big presumptuous book, To find some sage’s rigid plan To tell me how to be a man. Tradition lays its dead hand cold Upon our youth—and we are old. But this wise hermit, this gray friar, He has no law but heart’s desire. He somehow touches higher truth, The circle of eternal youth. The Humming Bird A sudden whir of eager sound— And now a something throbs around The flowers that watch the fountain. Look! It touched the rose, the green leaves shook, I think, and yet so lightly tost That not a spark of dew was lost. Tell me, O Rose, what thing it is That now appears, now vanishes? Surely it took its fire-green hue From daybreaks that it glittered through; Quick, for this sparkle of the dawn Glints through the garden and is gone. What was the message, Rose, what word; Delight foretold, or hope deferred? The Round-Up Down, down the wild canyons we go in a flurry; The cedars sweep by in their mystical hurry; Gone into the wind are the languor and worry— Gone into the west with the phantom moon. Ho! there is the lord of the hills and the valleys; It is he that leads in the midsummer sallies High into the steeps where the gray chaparral is; It is he that leads to the low lagoon. Where the wild mustard splashes the slope with yellow, He has turned at bay—ah, the powerful fellow! See the toss of his head—hear the breath and the bellow; How he tears the ground with his angry hoofs! Now he breaks a wild path through the deep, plumy rushes, (A loud bird high on a tamarack hushes) Right on through a glory of crimson he crushes, On into the gloom under leafy roofs.