Strong child! Song child! Who can unravel All your long travel Out of the Mystery, birth after birth— Out of the dim worlds deeper than Earth? Mad thing! Glad thing! How will Life tame you? How will God name you? All that I know is that you are to me Wind over water, star on the sea. Dear heart! Near heart! Long is the journey, Hard is the tourney: Would I could be by your side when you fall— Would that my own heart could suffer it all! A Mendocino Memory Once in my lonely, eager youth I rode, With jingling spur, into the clouds’ abode— Rode northward lightly as the high crane goes— Rode into the hills in the month of the frail wild rose, To find the soft-eyed heifers in the herds, Strayed north along the trail of nesting birds, Following the slow march of the springing grass, From range to range, from pass to flowering pass. I took the trail: the fields were yet asleep; I saw the last star hurrying to its deep— Saw the shy wood-folk starting from their rest In many a crannied rock and leafy nest. A bold, tail-flashing squirrel in a fir, Restless as fire, set all the boughs astir; A jay, in dandy blue, flung out a fine First fleering sally from a sugar-pine. A flight of hills, and then a deep ravine Hung with madrono boughs—the quail’s demesne; A quick turn in the road, a wingèd whir, And there he came with fluted whispering, The captain of the chaparral, the king, With nodding plume, with circumstance and stir, And step of Carthaginian conqueror! I climbed the canyon to a river-head, And looking backward saw a splendor spread, Miles beyond miles, of every kingly hue And trembling tint the looms of Arras knew— A flowery pomp as of the dying day, A splendor where a god might take his way. And farther on the wide plains under me, I watched the light-foot winds of morning go, Soft shading over wheat-fields far and free, To keep their old appointment with the sea. And farther yet, dim in the distant glow, Hung on the east a line of ghostly snow.