Alone I list In the leafy tryst; Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep-- Silent the phantom wood in waters deep: No footfall of a wind along the pass Startles a harebell--stirs a blade of grass. Yonder the wandering weeds, Enchanted in the light, Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white; Yonder are plumy reeds, Dusking the border of the clear lagoon; Far off the silver clifts Hang in ethereal light below the moon; Far off the ocean lifts, Tossing its billows in the misty beam, And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream: I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken: This is the valley: here the branches darken The silver-lighted stream. Hark-- That rapture in the leafy dark! Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing, Waking the upland and the valley under? What carols, like the blazon of a king, Fill all the dawn with wonder? Oh, hush, It is the thrush, In the deep and woody glen! Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung, When the old Earth was young; That rapture rang, When the first morning on the mountains sprang: And now he shouts, and the world is young again! Carol, my king, On your bough aswing Thou art not of these evil days-- Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth: Oh, tell me what is duty--what is truth-- How to find God upon these hungry ways; Tell of the golden prime, When men beheld swift deities descend, Before the race was left alone with Time, Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end, When bird and beast could make a man their friend; Before great Pan was dead, Before the naiads fled; When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold, With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold, Startled the still dawn-- Shone in upon the mountains and were gone, Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old. Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways, Before the weird earth-hunger of these days, When there was rippling mirth, When justice was on Earth, And light and grandeur of the Golden Age; When never a heart was sad, When all from king to herdsman had A penny for a wage. Ah, that old time has faded to a dream-- The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream; Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let The exiled race not utterly forget; Publish thy revelation on the lawns-- Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns; Sometime, in some sweet year, These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear.