One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. Fifty Years Spent. [Maxwell Struthers Burt] Fifty years spent before I found me, Wind on my mouth and the taste of the rain, Where the great hills circled and swept around me And the torrents leapt to the mist-drenched plain; Ah, it was long this coming of me Back to the hills and the sounding sea. Ye who can go when so it tideth To fallow fields when the Spring is new, Finding the spirit that there abideth, Taking fill of the sun and the dew; Little ye know of the cross of the town And the small pale folk who go up and down. Fifty years spent before I found me A bank knee-deep with climbing rose, Saw, or had space to look around me, Knew how the apple buds and blows; And all the while that I thought me wise I walked as one with blinded eyes. Scarcely a lad who passes twenty But finds him a girl to balm his heart; Only I, who had work so plenty, Bade this loving keep apart: Once I saw a girl in a crowd, But I hushed my heart when it cried out aloud. City courts in January, -- City courts in wilted June, Often ye will catch and carry Echoes of some straying tune; Ah, but underneath the feet Echo stifles in a street. Fifty years spent, and what do they bring me? Now I can buy the meadow and hill: Where is the heart of the boy to sing thee? Where is the life for thy living to fill? And thirty years back in a city crowd I passed a girl when my heart cried loud! The City. [Charles Hanson Towne] When, sick of all the sorrow and distress That flourished in the City like foul weeds, I sought blue rivers and green, opulent meads, And leagues of unregarded loneliness Whereon no foot of man had seemed to press, I did not know how great had been my needs, How wise the woodland's gospels and her creeds, How good her faith to one long comfortless. But in the silence came a Voice to me; In every wind it murmured, and I knew It would not cease though far my heart might roam. It called me in the sunrise and the dew, At noon and twilight, sadly, hungrily, The jealous City, whispering always -- "Home!" The Most-Sacred Mountain. [Eunice Tietjens] Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand steps of climbing! This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy. Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity. Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves against the sky, And one black bird circles above the void. Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; And with them broods eternity -- a swift, white peace, a presence manifest. The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end.