O SPIRIT! at whose wafts of chilling breath
Autumn unbinds her zone, to rest in death;
Touched by whose blight the light of cordial days
Is lost in sombre browns and sullen grays;
Thou seemest of all sad things a mournful part:
Yet now we greet thee with exultant heart.
Not as a thief, at night-time bearing doom,
But a brave messenger of grace and bloom;
Thy flickering robe and footsteps soft we mark
Down the dim borders of the tremulous Dark;
And though before thee flowers and foliage wane,
Thou layest a magic hand on human pain.
Red Fever, soothed by thy cool finger-tips,
Ebbs from hot cheek and wildly-muttering lips;
Delirious dreams and frenzied fancies fade
Into fine landscapes of enchanted shade,
With low of kine and lapse of lyric rills
Through the cleft channel of Arcadian hills;
Till the worn patient feels his languid eyes
Flushed with what seems an earthly Paradise,
And life's old blissful tide, with lustier strain,
Revels in music through each ransomed vein.
Therefore, O monarch of all cold device,
Wrought in strange temples of Siberian ice!
Lord of fair realms and watery worlds grotesque!
Majestic afreet of weird Arabesque!
We hail thee sovereign in these fevered lands.
No more with alien hearts and folded hands,
But as an angel from the fadeless palms,
And the great River of God's central calms,
Whose silent charm must work benign release,
Whose touch is healing, and whose breath is--peace!
