"O is it here," I cried, "that bird that sings So that the traveller in his frenzy weeps?" It was the autumn of the year, and leaves Fell with a dizzying moan, and all the trees Roared like the sea at my small impotent voice. And if that bird was there it did not sing, And I knew not its haunts, or where it went, But carven stood and raved! In that old wood that dripped upon my face Upturned below, pale in its passionate chase. 6 And years went by, and I grew slowly cold: I had forgotten what I once had sought. There are no passions that do not grow dim, And like a fire imagination sinks Into the ashes of the mind's cold grate. And if I dreamed, I dreamed of that far land, That coast of pearl upon a summer sea, Whose frail trees in unruffled amber sleep, Gaudy with jewelled birds, whose feathers spray Bright founts of colour through the tranquil day. 7 The hill, the gully, and the stony stream I had not thought on when this spring I sat In a strange room with candles guttering down Into the flickering silence. From the Moon Among the trees still-wreathed upon the sky There came the sudden twittering of a ghost. And I stept out from darkness, and I saw The great pale sky immense, transparent, filled With boughs and mountains and wide-shining lakes Where stillness, crying in a thin voice, breaks. 8 It was the voice of that imagined bird. I saw the gully and that ancient hill, The water trickling down from Paradise Shaking the tiny boughs of maidenhair. There sat the dreaming boy. And O! I wept to see that scene again, To read the black print on that snowy page, I wept, and all was still. No shadow came into that sun-steeped glen, No sound of earth, no voice of living men. 9 Was it a dream or was it that in me A God awoke and gazing on his dream Saw that dream rise and gaze into its soul, Finding, Narcissus-like, its image there: A Song, a transitory Shape on water blown, Descending down the bright cascades of time, The shadowiest-flowering, ripple-woven bloom As ghostly as still waters' unseen foam That lies upon the air, as that song lay Within my heart on one far summer day? 10