Invitation brought by the wind, and sent by the rose and the oak. I sat on the steps—warm summer noon—in a garden, and half cloudy with low clouds, sun hot, rich mocking bird singing, bee brushing down a big raindrop from a flower, where it hung tremulous. The bird's music is echoed from the breasts of roses, and reflex sound comes doubly back with grace of odor.—First came the lizard, dandiest of reptiles; then the bee, then small strange insects that wear flap-wings and spider-web legs, and crawl up the slim green stalks of grass; the catbirds, the flowers, with each a soul—this is the company I like; the talk, the gossip anent the last news of the spirit, the marriage of man and nature, the betrothal of Science and Art, the failure of the great house of Buy and Sell (see following note[1]), a rumor out of the sun, and many messages concerning the stars. Footnote 1: Buy and Sell failed because Love was a partner. "This Love, now, who is he?" said a comfortable burgher oak. "I hear much of him these later days." Why, Love, he owneth all things: trees and land and water power. Oh, man falls into this wide sea of life Like a pebble dropped by idle bands in water. The little circle of the stir he makes Does lessen as it widens, until Death Comes on, and straightway the round ripple is gone out. The grave is a cup Wherewith I dip up My draughts from the lake of life. (Death, loquitor.) Death is the cup-bearer of Heaven, God's Ganymede, and his cup is the grave, and life is the wine that fills it. Birth is but a folding of our wings. When bees, in honey-frenzies, rage and rage, And their hot dainty wars with flowers wage, Foraying in the woods for sweet rapine And spreading odorous havoc o'er the green. All men are pearl-divers, and we have but plunged down into this straggling salt-sea of Life—to find a pearl. This Pearl, like all others, comes from a wound: it is the Pearl of Love after Grief. It is always sunrise and always sunset somewhere on the earth. And so, with a silver sunrise before him and a golden sunset behind him, the Royal Sun fares through Heaven, like a king with a herald and a retinue. Night's a black-haired poet, and he's in love with Day. But he never meets her save at early morn and late eve, when they fall into each other's arms and draw out a lingering kiss: so folded together at such times that we cannot distinguish bright maid from dark lover; and so we call it Dawn and Twilight—it being Not light, but lustrous dark; Not dark, but secret light. These green and swelling hills, crowned with white tents, Like vast green waves, white-foaming at the top.