I CANNOT tell when first I saw her face;
Was it athwart a sunset on the sea,
When the huge billows heaved tumultuously,
Or in the quiet of some woodland place,
Wrapped by the shadowy boon
Of breezeless verdures from the summer noon?
Or likelier still, in a rock-girdled dell
Between vast mountains, while the midnight hour
Blossomed above me like a shining flower,
Whose star-wrought petals turned the fields of space
To one great garden of mysterious light?
Vain! vain! I cannot tell
When first the beauty and majestic might
Of her calm presence, bore my soul apart
From all low issues of the grovelling world;--
About me their own peace and grandeur furled,--
Filling the conscious heart
With vague, sweet wisdom drawn from earth or sky,--
Secrets that glance towards eternity,
Visions divine, and thoughts ineffable!
But ever since that immemorial day,
A steadfast flame hath burned in brain and blood,
Urging me onward in the perilous search
For sacred haunts our queenly mother loves;
By field and flood,
Thro' neighboring realms, and regions far away,
Have I not followed, followed where she led,
Tracking wild rivers to their fountain head,
And wilder desert spaces, mournful, vast,
Where Nature, fronting her inscrutable past,
Holds bleak communion only with the dead;
Yearning meanwhile, for pinions like a dove's,
To waft me further still,
Beyond the compass of the unwinged will;
Yea; waft me northward, southward, east, or west,
By fabled isles, and undiscovered lands,
To where enthroned upon his mountain-perch,
The sovereign eagle stands,
Guarding the unfledged eaglets in their nest,
Above the thunders of the sea and storm?
Oh! sometimes by the fire
Of holy passion, in me, all subdued,
And melted to a mortal woman's mood,
Tender and warm,--
She, from her goddess height,
In gracious answer to my soul's desire,
Descending softly, lifts her Isis veil,
To bend on me the untranslated light
Of fathomless eyes, and brow divinely pale:
She lays on mine her firm, immortal hand;
And I, encompassed by a magical mist,
Feel that her lips have kissed
Mine eyes and forehead;--how the influence fine
Of her deep life runs like Arcadian wine
Through all my being! How a moment pressed
To the large fountains of her opulent breast,
A rapture smites me, half akin to pain;
A sun-flash quivering through white chords of rain!
Thenceforth, I walked
The earth all-seeing;--not her stateliest forms
Alone engrossed me, nor her sounds of power;
Mountains and oceans, and the rage of storms;
Fierce cataracts hurled from awful steep to steep,
Or, the gray water-spouts, that whirling tower
Along the darkened bosom of the deep;
But all fair, fairy forms; all vital things,
That breathe or blossom 'midst our bounteous springs;
In sylvan nooks rejoicingly I met
The wild rose and the violet;
On dewy hill-slopes pausing, fondly talked
With the coy wind-flower, and the grasses brown,
That in a subtle language of their own
(Caught from the spirits of the wandering breeze),
Quaintly responded; while the heavens looked down
As graciously on these
Titania growths, as on sublimer shapes
Of century-moulded continents, that bemock
Alike the earthquake's and the billows' shock
By Orient inlands and cold ocean capes!
The giant constellations rose and set:
I knew them all, and worshipped all I knew;
Yet, from their empire in the pregnant blue,
Sweeping from planet-orbits to faint bars
Of nebulous cloud, beyond the range of stars,
I turned to worship with a heart as true,
Long mosses drooping from the cypress-tree;
The virginal vines that stretched remotely dim,
From forest limb to limb;
Network of golden ferns, whose tracery weaves
In lingering twilights of warm August eves,
Ethereal frescoes, pictures fugitive,
Drawn on the flickering and fair-foliaged wall
Of the dense forest, ere the night shades fall:
Rushes rock-tangled, whose mixed colors live
In the pure moisture by a fountain's brim;
The sylph-like reeds, wave-born, that to and fro
Move ever to the waters' rhythmic flow,
Blent with the humming of the wild-wood bee,
And the winds' under thrills of mystery;
The twinkling "ground-stars," full of modest cheer,
Each her cerulean cup
In humble supplication lifting up,
To catch whate'er the kindly heavens may give
Of flooded sunshine, or celestial dew;
And even when, self-poised in airy grace,
Their phantom lightness stirs
Through glistening shadows of a secret place
The silvery-tinted gossamers;
For thus hath Nature taught amid her All,--
The complex miracles of land and sea,
And infinite marvels of the infinite air,
No life is trivial, no creation small!
Ever I walk the earth,
As one whose spiritual ear
Is strangely purged and purified to hear
Its multitudinous voices; from the shore
Whereon the savage Arctic surges roar,
And the stupendous bass of choral waves
Thunders o'er "wandering graves,"
From warrior-winds whose viewless cohorts charge
The banded mists through Cloudland's vaporous dearth,
Pealing their battle bugles round the marge
Of dreary fen and desolated moor;
Down to the ripple of shy woodland rills
Chanting their delicate treble 'mid the hills,
And ancient hollows of the enchanted ground,--
I pass with reverent thought,
Attuned to every tiniest trill of sound,
Whether by brook or bird
The perfumed air be stirred.
But most, because the unwearied strains are fraught
With Nature's freedom in her happiest moods,
I love the mock-bird's, and brown thrush's lay,
The melted soul of May.
Beneath those matchless notes,
From jocund hearts upwelled to fervid threats,
In gushes of clear harmony,
I seem, oft-times I seem
To find remoter meanings; the far tone
Of ante-natal music faintly blown
From out the misted realms of memory;
The pathos and the passion of a dream;
Or, broken fugues of a diviner tongue
That e'er hath chanted, since our earth was young,
And o'er her peace-enamored solitudes
The stars of morning sung!
