Dead myths, to whom such dreams belong! O beautiful philosophies Of Nature! crystallized in song And marble, peopling lost seas, Lost forests and the star-lost vast, Grant me the childlike faith that clung.-- Through loveliness that could not last,-- To Heaven in the pagan past, Calling for God with infant tongue!
Idea, god of Plato! one With beauty, justice, truth and love: Who, type by type, the world begun From an ideal world above! Reason, who into Nature wrought Your real entities,--which are Ideas,--giving to our star Their beauty through reflected thought;
The reminiscences that flame, Momental, through the mind of man, Of things his memory can not name, Lost things his knowledge can not scan,-- Hints of past periods are not these, His soul hath lived since it had birth In God?--Yea! who shall say that Earth More ancient is than he who sees?
Beside us, and yet far above, She leads us to no base renown-- The Ideal, with her sun-white crown, And starry raiment of her love: She leads us by ascending ways Of Nature to her purposed ends, Who in the difficult, dark days Of trial with her smile defends.
Beyond the years, that blindly grope, To climb with her, from year to year, To some exalted atmosphere, Were more than earthly joy or hope! Though in that atmosphere we find Not her--her influence, pointing to New elevations of the mind By some superior avenue.
The climbing-cricket in the dusk Moves wings of moony gossamer; Its vague, vibrating note I hear Among the boughs of dew and musk, Whence, rustling with a mellow thud, The ripe quince falls. Low, deep and clear, The west is bound with burning blood.
The slanting bats beneath the moon,-- A dark disk edge with glittering white,-- Spin loops of intertangled night: An owl wakes, hooting over soon, Within the forest far away: And now the heav’n fills, light by light, And all the blood-red west grows gray.
I hear no sound of wind or wave; No sob or song, except the slow Leaf-cricket’s flute-soft tremolo, Among wet walks grown gray and grave.-- In raiment mists of silver sear, With strange, pale eyes thou comest, O Thou Spirit of the Waning-Year!
The hills are full of prophecies And ancient voices of the dead; Of hidden shapes that no man sees, Pale, visionary presences, That speak the things no tongue hath said, No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.