Away, unfruitful lore of books, For whose vain idiom we reject The spirit's mother-dialect, Aliens among the birds and brooks, Dull to interpret or believe What gospels lost the woods retrieve, Or what the eaves-dropping violet Reports from God, who walketh yet His garden in the hush of eve! Away, ye pedants city-bred, Unwise of heart, too wise of head, Who handcuff Art with _thus and so_, And in each other's footprints tread, Like those who walk through drifted snow; Who, from deep study of brick walls Conjecture of the water-falls, By six square feet of smoke-stained sky Compute those deeps that overlie The still tarn's heaven-anointed eye, And, in your earthen crucible, With chemic tests essay to spell How nature works in field and dell! Seek we where Shakspeare buried gold? Such hands no charmed witch-hazel hold; To beach and rock repeats the sea The mystic _Open Sesame_; Old Greylock's voices not in vain Comment on Milton's mountain strain, And cunningly the various wind Spenser's locked music can unbind. A REVERIE. In the twilight deep and silent Comes thy spirit unto mine, When the moonlight and the starlight Over cliff and woodland shine, And the quiver of the river Seems a thrill of joy benign. Then I rise and wander slowly To the headland by the sea, When the evening star throbs setting Through the cloudy cedar tree, And from under, mellow thunder Of the surf comes fitfully. Then within my soul I feel thee Like a gleam of other years, Visions of my childhood murmur Their old madness in my ears, Till the pleasance of thy presence Cools my heart with blissful tears. All the wondrous dreams of boyhood-- All youth's fiery thirst of praise-- All the surer hopes of manhood Blossoming in sadder days-- Joys that bound me, griefs that crowned me With a better wreath than bays-- All the longings after freedom-- The vague love of human kind, Wandering far and near at random Like a winged seed in the wind-- The dim yearnings and fierce burnings Of an undirected mind-- All of these, oh best belovèd, Happiest present dreams and past, In thy love find safe fulfilment, Ripened into truths at last; Faith and beauty, hope and duty To one centre gather fast. How my nature, like an ocean, At the breath of thine awakes, Leaps its shores in mad exulting And in foamy thunder breaks, Then downsinking, lieth shrinking At the tumult that it makes! Blazing Hesperus hath sunken Low within the pale-blue west, And with golden splendor crowneth The horizon's piny crest; Thoughtful quiet stills the riot Of wild longing in my breast. Home I loiter through the moonlight, Underneath the quivering trees, Which, as if a spirit stirred them, Sway and bend, till by degrees The far surge's murmur merges In the rustle of the breeze. IN SADNESS.