Come! let us lie and dream Here by the wildwood stream, Where many a twinkling gleam Falls on the rooty Banks; and the forest glooms Rain down their redbud blooms, Armfuls of wild perfumes-- Winds! or Auloniads busy with beauty. MIRABILE DICTU I There dwells a goddess in the West, An Island in death-lonesome seas; No towered towns are hers confessed, No castled forts or palaces; Hers, simple worshipers at best, The buds, the birds, the bees. II And she hath wonder-words of song, So heavenly beautiful and shed So sweetly from her honeyed tongue, The savage creatures, it is said, Hark, marble-still, their wilds among, And nightingales fall dead. III I know her not, nor have I known: I only feel that she is there: For when my heart is most alone, Her deep communion fills the air,-- Her influence calls me from my own,-- Miraculously fair. IV Then fain am I to sing and sing, And then again to fly and fly, Beyond the flight of cloud or wing, Far under azure arcs of sky; My love at her chaste feet to fling, Behold her face and--die. A DREAMER OF DREAMS He lived beyond men, and so stood Admitted to the brotherhood Of beauty; dreams, with which he trod Companioned as some sylvan god. And oft men wondered, when his thought Made all their knowledge seem as naught, If he, like Uther's mystic son, Had not been born for Avalon. When wandering 'mid the whispering trees, His soul communed with every breeze; Heard voices calling from the glades, Bloom-words of the Leimoniads; Or Dryads of the ash and oak, Who syllabled his name and spoke With him of presences and powers That glimpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers. By every violet-hallowed brook, Where every bramble-matted nook Rippled and laughed with water sounds, He walked like one on sainted grounds, Fearing intrusion on the spell That kept some fountain-spirit's well, Or woodland genius, sitting where Red, racy berries kissed his hair. Once when the wind, far o'er the hill, Had fall'n and left the wildwood still For Dawn's dim feet to glide across,-- Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss, The air around him golden ripe With daybreak,--there, with oaten pipe, His eyes beheld the wood-god, Pan, Goat-bearded, and half-brute, half-man; Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhyme Blew in his reed to rudest time; And swollen-jowled, with rolling eye-- Beneath the slowly silvering sky, Whose light shone through the forest's roof-- Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoof The branch was snapped, and, interfused Between great roots, the moss was bruised.