Henry Clarence Kendall TO A MOUNTAIN To thee, O father of the stately peaks, Above me in the loftier light to thee, Imperial brother of those awful hills, Whose feet are set in splendid spheres of flame, Whose heads are where the gods are, and whose sides Of strength are belted round with all the zones Of all the world, I dedicate these songs. And if, within the compass of this book, There lives and glows one verse in which there beats The pulse of wind and torrent - if one line Is here that like a running water sounds, And seems an echo from the lands of leaf, Be sure that line is thine. Here, in this home, Away from men and books and all the schools, I take thee for my Teacher. In thy voice Of deathless majesty, I, kneeling, hear God's grand authentic gospel! Year by year, The great sublime cantata of thy storm Strikes through my spirit-fills it with a life Of startling beauty! Thou my Bible art With holy leaves of rock, and flower, and tree, And moss, and shining runnel. From each page That helps to make thy awful volume, I The broad foundations of a finer hope up The blind horizon for a larger faith. As felt the grand old prophets caught away The silver fountains sing forever. Far Is thy august companion; and thy peers years, There rolls the grand hymn of the deathless wave. COOGEE SING the song of wave-worn Coogee, Coogee in the distance white, With its jags and points disrupted, gaps and fractures fringed with light; Haunt of gledes, and restless plovers of the melancholy wail, Ever lending deeper pathos to the melancholy gale. There, my brothers, down the fissures, chasms deep and wan and wild, Grows the sea-bloom, one that blushes like a shrinking, fair, blind child; And amongst the oozing forelands many a glad green rock-vine runs, Getting ease on earthy ledges, sheltered from December suns. Often, when a gusty morning, rising cold and gray and strange, Lifts its face from watery spaces, vistas full with cloudy change, Bearing up a gloomy burden which anon begins to wane, Fading in the sudden shadow of a dark determined rain, Do I seek an eastern window, so to watch the breakers beat Round the steadfast crags of Coogee, dim with drifts of driving sleet: Hearing hollow mournful noises sweeping down a solemn shore, While the grim sea-caves are tideless, and the storm strives at their core. Often when the floating vapors fill the silent autumn leas, Dreaming memories fall like moonlight over silent sleeping seas, Friend of mine beyond the waters, here and there these perished days Haunt me with their sweet dead faces and their old divided ways. You that helped and you that loved me, take this song, and when you read Let the lost things come about you, set your thoughts, and hear and heed. Time has laid his burden on uswe who wear our manhood now, We would be the boys we have been, free of heart and bright of brow, Be the boys for just an hour, with the splendor and the speech Of thy lights and thunders, Coogee, flying up thy gleaming beach. Heart's desire and heart's division! who would come and say to me, With the eyes of far-off friendship, "You are as you used to be?" Something glad and good has left me here with sickening discontent, Tired of looking, neither knowing what it was or where it went. So it is this sight of Coogee, shining in the morning dew, Sets me stumbling through dim summers once on fire with youth and you— Summers pale as southern evenings when the year has lost its power And the wasted face of April weeps above the withered flower. Not that seasons bring no solace, not that time lacks light and rest, But the old things were the dearest, and the old loves seem the best. We that start at songs familiar, we that tremble at a tone Floating down the ways of music, like a sigh of sweetness flown, We can never feel the freshness, never find again the mood Left among fair-featured places, brightened of our brotherhood. This and this we have to think of when the night is over all, When the woods begin to perish, and the rains begin to fall. SEPTEMBER IN AUSTRALIA GRAY Winter hath gone, like a wearisome guest, And, behold, for repayment, September comes in with the wind of the West And the Spring in her raiment ! The stories of Youth, of the burden of Time, And the death of Devotion, Come back with the wind, and are themes of the rhyme In the waves of the ocean. We, having a secret to others unknown, May whisper together, September, alone One word for her beauty, and one for the place She gave to the hours; And then we may kiss her, and suffer her face To sleep with the flowers. The ways of the frost have been filled of High places that knew of the gold and the the flowers, While the forest discovers white On the forehead of Morning Wild wings, with the halo of hyaline hours, Now darken and quake, and the steps of And a music of lovers. She lightens and lingers the Night Are heavy with warning! Her voice in the distance is lofty and loud Through its echoing gorges; She hath hidden her eyes in a mantle of cloud, And her feet in the surges ! On the tops of the hills, on the turreted cones Chief temples of thunder In spots where the harp of the evening The gale, like a ghost, in the middle watch glows, Attuned by her fingers. The stream from its home in the hollow hill slips In a darling old fashion; And the day goeth down with a song on its lips Whose key-note is passion; Far out in the fierce, bitter front of the sea I stand, and remember Dead things that were brothers and sisters of thee, Resplendent September. The West, when it blows at the fall of the noon And beats on the beaches, So filled with a tender and tremulous tune That touches and teaches; With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands, And gleams like a dream in his face THE VOICE IN THE WILD OAK TWELVE years ago, when I could face High heaven's dome with different eyes, In days full-flowered with hours of grace, And nights not sad with sighs, I wrote a song in which I strove To shadow forth thy strain of woe, But youth was then too young to find But he who hears this autumn day Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme, He has no need, like many a bard, No more he sees the affluence Which makes the heart of Nature glad ; For he has lost the fine first sense Of beauty that he had. His song is like thine own. grown; But I, who am that perished soul, Yet here, where plovers nightly call Across dim melancholy leas Where comes by whistling fen and fall A gray old Fancy often sits Beneath thy shade with tired wings, And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits With awful utterings. Then times there are when all the words Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be Imprisoned, cramped in bands of bark, For all eternity. Yea, like the speech of one aghast At Immortality in chains, What time the lordly storm rides past With flames and arrowy rains: Some wan Tithonus of the wood, White with immeasurable years An awful ghost, in solitude With moaning moors and meres ! And when high thunder smites the hill Percy F. Sinnett More than ever you could gather— We have seen, and heard, and laughed, We tossed them like a plaything, We have laughed, and heard, and seen, And the growling thunder's blast; For their fears. |