The days should move to music; wildly tame The nights should move to music and the stars; And morn and evening in their opal cars, Like heralds, banner God's eternal name.
O world! O life! desired and to be! How shall we reach thee?--dark the way and dim. --Give me your hand, love, let us follow him, Love with the mystery and the melody.
_He, observing the various flowers around them:_
Violets and anemones The surrendered hours Pour, as handsels, round the knees Of the Spring, who to the breeze Flings her myriad flowers.
Like to coins the sumptuous day Strews with blossoms golden Every furlong of his way,-- Like a Sultan gone to pray At a Kaaba olden.
And the night, with spark on spark, Clad in dim attire, Dots with Stars the haloed dark,-- As a priest around the Ark Lights his lamps of fire.
These are but the cosmic strings To the harp of Beauty, To that instrument which sings In our souls of love that brings Peace and faith and duty.
Duty?--Comfort of the sinner And the saint!--when grief and trial Weigh us, and within our inner Selves,--responsive to love's viol,-- Hope's soft voice grows thin and thinner, It is kin to self-denial.
Self-denial!--through whose feeling We are gainer though we're loser; All the finer force revealing Of our natures. No accuser Is the conscience then, but healing Of the wound of which we're chooser.
Some one said no flower knoweth Of the fragrance it revealeth; Song, its soul that overfloweth, Never nightingale's heart feeleth-- Such the love the spirit groweth, Love unconscious if it healeth.
An elf there is who stables the hot Red wasp that stings on the apricot; An elf who rowels his spiteful bay Like a mote on a ray, away, away; An elf who saddles the hornet lean To din i' the ear o' the swinging bean; Who straddles, with cap cocked all awry, The bottle-blue back o' the dragon-fly.
And this is the elf who sips and sips From clover-horns whence the perfume drips; And, drunk with dew, in the glimmering gloam Awaits the wild-bee's coming home; In ambush lies, where none may see, And robs the caravan bumble-bee-- Gold bags of honey the bees must pay To the bandit elf of the fairy way.
Another ouphen the butterflies know, Who paints their wings with the hues that glow On blossoms.--Squeezing from tubes of dew Pansy colors of every hue On his bloom's pied pallet, he paints the wings Of the butterflies, moths, and other things. This is the elf that the hollyhocks hear, Who dangles a brilliant in each one's ear; Teases at noon the pane's green fly, And lights at night the glow-worm's eye.