TO lie beside a stream, upon the sod At ease, while weary shepherds homeward plod, And feel benignly by, as daylight mellows, The mountains in their weathering period; Aye so, with silence shod To lie in depth of grass with man’s meek fellows, The cattle large and calm, aware of God, And, keen as if to flesh the spirit sprang, To hear,--O but to hear that silvern clang Of young hale melody! and hither rally The thrill, the aspiration, and the pang Again, as once it rang Sovereign and clear thro’ all the Saco valley, Whose slaves were we that heard, and he that sang! Happy the spot, the hour, the spanning strain Precious and far, the rainbow of the rain, The seal of patience, dark endeavor’s summing, The heaven-bright close of Pergolese’s pain! Sighs bid it back in vain, Nor win its peer, till craftsmen aftercoming Lost art, lost heart, from shipwrecked years regain. How, like an angel, it effaced the crime, The moil and heat of our tempestuous time, And brought from dewier air, to us who waited, The breath of peace, the healing breath sublime! As falls, at midnight’s chime To an old pilgrim, plodding on belated, The thought of Love’s remote sunshining prime. There flits upon the wind’s wing, as we gaze, Our northern springtime, virgin-green three days; The racy water shallowing, the glory Of jonquils strewn, the wafted apple-sprays: O let it be thy praise, Child-song too lovely and too transitory! Thou art as they; thy feet have gone their ways. O beauty unassailable! O bride Of memory! while yet thou didst abide The yester joy was ours, the joy to-morrow, Life’s brimming whole: and since to earth denied, Soft ebbed thy dreamy tide, To us the first, the full, the only sorrow, Wild as when Abel out of Eden died. LATE PEACE. AS a pool beset with lilies In the May-green copses hid, Far from wayfarers and wrongers, Clangors, rumors, disillusions, Neighbored by the wild-grape only, By the hemlock’s dreamy host, By the Rhodian nightingale, O remote, remote, O lonely!-- So thy life is. Whence and wherefore is it Never peace may be co-dweller With my lakelet Too belovèd and too sheltered, That, secure from broil of cities, From a secret regnant spring To its own wild depth awaking, Makes but moaning and resistance, Undiminishable protest; Mimicking with pain and fury Of humanity the struggle; Fretting, foaming, pacing ever Round and round its fragrant cloister, All within itself perplexèd, Every heart-vein bruised but eager; And its clear soul, doubt-o’erladen, ’Neath the stirred and floating foulness, Long abased, long dumb, ah! long?-- So thy life is.