By night, far yonder, I surmise
  An ampler world than clips my ken,
Where the great stars of happier skies
  Commingle nobler fates of men.

I look and long, then haste me home,
  Still master of my secret rare;
Once tried, the path would end in Rome,
  But now it leads me everywhere.

Forever to the new it guides,
  From former good, old overmuch;
What Nature for her poets hides,
  ’Tis wiser to divine than clutch.

The bird I list hath never come
  Within the scope of mortal ear;
My prying step would make him dumb,
  And the fair tree, his shelter, sear.

Behind the hill, behind the sky,
  Behind my inmost thought, he sings;
No feet avail; to hear it nigh,
  The song itself must lend the wings.

Sing on, sweet bird close hid, and raise
  Those angel stairways in my brain,
That climb from these low-vaulted days
  To spacious sunshines far from pain.

Sing when thou wilt, enchantment fleet,
  I leave thy covert haunt untrod,
And envy Science not her feat
  To make a twice-told tale of God.

They said the fairies tript no more,
  And long ago that Pan was dead;
’Twas but that fools preferred to bore
  Earth’s rind inch-deep for truth instead.

Pan leaps and pipes all summer long,
  The fairies dance each full-mooned night,
Would we but doff our lenses strong,
  And trust our wiser eyes’ delight.

City of Elf-land, just without
  Our seeing, marvel ever new,
Glimpsed in fair weather, a sweet doubt
  Sketched-in, mirage-like, on the blue,

I build thee in yon sunset cloud,
  Whose edge allures to climb the height;
I hear thy drowned bells, inly-loud,
  From still pools dusk with dreams of night.

Thy gates are shut to hardiest will,
  Thy countersign of long-lost speech,—­
Those fountained courts, those chambers still,
  Fronting Time’s far East, who shall reach?

I know not, and will never pry,
  But trust our human heart for all;
Wonders that from the seeker fly
  Into an open sense may fall.

Hide in thine own soul, and surprise
  The password of the unwary elves;
Seek it, thou canst not bribe their spies;
  Unsought, they whisper it themselves.

POEMS OF THE WAR

THE WASHERS OF THE SHROUD

OCTOBER, 1861

Along a river-side, I know not where,
I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.

Pale fireflies pulsed within the meadow-mist
Their hales, wavering thistledowns of light;
The loon, that seemed to mock some goblin tryst,
Laughed; and the echoes, huddling in affright,
Like Odin’s hounds, fled baying down the night. 10