All the world’s woods, tree o’er tree,
    Come to nought. 
Birds, flowers, beasts, how transient they,
Angels of a flying day. 
Love is quenched; dreams drown in sleep;
Ruin nods along the deep: 
Only thou immortally
    Hauntest on
This poor earth in Time’s flux caught;
Hauntest on, pursued, unwon,
Phantom child of memory,
    Beauteous one!

VOICES

Who is it calling by the darkened river
  Where the moss lies smooth and deep,
And the dark trees lean unmoving arms,
  Silent and vague in sleep,
And the bright-heeled constellations pass
  In splendour through the gloom;
Who is it calling o’er the darkened river
      In music, “Come!”?

Who is it wandering in the summer meadows
  Where the children stoop and play
In the green faint-scented flowers, spinning
  The guileless hours away? 
Who touches their bright hair? who puts
  A wind-shell to each cheek,
Whispering betwixt its breathing silences,
      “Seek! seek!”?

Who is it watching in the gathering twilight
  When the curfew bird hath flown
On eager wings, from song to silence,
  To its darkened nest alone? 
Who takes for brightening eyes the stars,
  For locks the still moonbeam,
Sighs through the dews of evening peacefully
      Falling, “Dream!”?

THULE

If thou art sweet as they are sad
  Who on the shores of Time’s salt sea
Watch on the dim horizon fade
  Ships bearing love to night and thee;

If past all beacons Hope hath lit
  In the dark wanderings of the deep
They who unwilling traverse it
  Dream not till dawn unseal their sleep;

Ah, cease not in thy winds to mock
  Us, who yet wake, but cannot see
Thy distant shores; who at each shock
  Of the waves’ onset faint for thee!

THE BIRTHNIGHT:  TO F.

Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss: 
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
    Thou, lovely thing.

THE DEATH-DREAM

Who, now, put dreams into thy slumbering mind? 
Who, with bright Fear’s lean taper, crossed a hand
Athwart its beam, and stooping, truth maligned,
Spake so thy spirit speech should understand,
And with a dread “He’s dead!” awaked a peal
Of frenzied bells along the vacant ways
Of thy poor earthly heart; waked thee to steal,
Like dawn distraught upon unhappy days,
To prove nought, nothing?  Was it Time’s