FOR what need I of book or priest,
Or sibyl from the mummied East,
When every star is Bethlehem star?
I count as many as there are
Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,
So many saints and saviors,
So many high behaviors

Salute the bard who is alive

And only sees what he doth give.

COIN the day-dawn into lines
In which its proper splendor shines;
Coin the moonlight into verse

Which all its marvel shall rehearse,

Chasing with words fast-flowing things; nor try

To plant thy shrivelled pedantry

On the shoulders of the sky.

Aн, not to me those dreams belong!
A better voice peals through my song.

THE Muse's hill by Fear is guarded,

A bolder foot is still rewarded.

His instant thought a poet spoke,
And filled the age his fame;

An inch of ground the lightning strook

But lit the sky with flame.'

IF bright the sun, he tarries,
All day his song is heard;
And when he goes he carries

No more baggage than a bird.

THE Asmodean feat is mine,
To spin my sand-heap into twine.”

SLIGHTED Minerva's learnèd tongue, But leaped with joy when on the wind The shell of Clio rung.

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE

NATURE

THE patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar,
Sleeps or feigns slumber,
Drowsily humming

Music to the march of time.

This poor tooting, creaking cricket,
Pan, half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,

Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;
'Tis his manner,

Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps and Andes cold;
Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.'

COME search the wood for flowers,

Wild tea and wild pea,

Grapevine and succory,

Coreopsis

And liatris,

Flaunting in their bowers;

Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern and agrimony;

Forest full of essences

Fit for fairy presences,
Peppermint and sassafras,

Sweet fern, mint and vernal grass,
Panax, black birch, sugar maple,
Sweet and scent for Dian's table,
Elder-blow, sarsaparilla,

Wild rose, lily, dry vanilla,

Spices in the plants that run

To bring their first fruits to the sun.
Earliest heats that follow frore

Nervèd leaf of hellebore,

Sweet willow, checkerberry red,

With its savory leaf for bread.

Silver birch and black

With the selfsame spice

Found in polygala root and rind,

Sassafras, fern, benzöine,

Mouse-ear, cowslip, wintergreen,
Which by aroma may compel

The frost to spare, what scents so well.

WHERE the fungus broad and red
Lifts its head,

Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread,
Where the aster grew
With the social goldenrod,
In a chapel, which the dew
Made beautiful for God:
O what would Nature say?
She spared no speech to-day:
The fungus and the bulrush spoke,
Answered the pine-tree and the oak,
The wizard South blew down the glen,
Filled the straits and filled the wide,
Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.
All things shine in his smoky ray,
And all we see are pictures high;

Many a high hillside,

While oaks of pride

Climb to their tops,

And boys run out upon their leafy ropes.

The maple street

In the houseless wood,

Voices followed after,
Every shrub and grape leaf
Rang with fairy laughter.
I have heard them fall
Like the strain of all
King Oberon's minstrelsy.