Throbbing and tingling,—­
With a human cheer
In the earth-song mingling,—­
Mirth and carousal,
Wooing, espousal,
Clinking of glasses
And laughter of lasses—­
And the wind in the garden stoops down as it passes
To play with the hair
Of the loveliest there,
And the wander-lust catches the will in its snare;
Hill-wind and spray-lure,
Call of the heath;
Dare in the teeth
Of the balk and the failure;
The clasp and the linger
Of loosening finger,
Loth to dissever;
Thrill of the comrade heart to its fellow
Through droughts that sicken and blasts that bellow
From purple furrow to harvest yellow,
Now and forever. 
How our feet itch to keep time to their measure! 
How our hearts lift to the lilt of their song! 
Let the world go, for a day’s royal pleasure! 
Not every summer such waifs come along.

Now they are off to the inn;
Hear the clean ring of their laughter! 
Cool as a hill-brook after
The beat of the noon sets in! 
Gentlemen even in jollity—­
Certainly people of quality!—­
Waifs and estrays no less,
Roofless and penniless,
They are the wayside strummers
Whose lips are man’s renown,
Those wayward brats of Summer’s
Who stroll from town to town;
Spendthrift of life, they ravish
The days of an endless store,
And ever the more they lavish
The heap of the hoard is more. 
For joy and love and vision
Are alive and breed and stay
When dust shall hold in derision
The misers of a day.

EARTH’S LYRIC.

April.  You hearken, my fellow,
Old slumberer down in my heart? 
There’s a whooping of ice in the rivers;
The sap feels a start.

The snow-melted torrents are brawling;
The hills, orange-misted and blue,
Are touched with the voice of the rainbird
Unsullied and new.

The houses of frost are deserted,
Their slumber is broken and done,
And empty and pale are the portals
Awaiting the sun.

The bands of Arcturus are slackened;
Orion goes forth from his place
On the slopes of the night, leading homeward
His hound from the chase.

The Pleiades weary and follow
The dance of the ghostly dawn;
The revel of silence is over;
Earth’s lyric comes on.

A golden flute in the cedars,
A silver pipe in the swales,
And the slow large life of the forest
Wells bade and prevails.

A breath of the woodland spirit
Has blown out the bubble of spring
To this tenuous hyaline glory
One touch sets a-wing.

THE WOOD-GOD.