So with thronged voices and unhasting flight
    The fervid hours with long return go by;
    The far-heard hylas piping shrill and high
Tell the slow moments of the solemn night
        With unremitting cry;
Lustrous and large out of the gathering drouth
    The planets gleam; the baleful Scorpion
Trails his dim fires along the droused south;
    The silent world-incrusted round moves on.

And all the dim night long the moon’s white beams
    Nestle deep down in every brooding tree,
    And sleeping birds, touched with a silly glee,
Waken at midnight from their blissful dreams,
        And carol brokenly. 
Dim surging motions and uneasy dreads
    Scare the light slumber from men’s busy eyes,
And parted lovers on their restless beds
    Toss and yearn out, and cannot sleep for sighs.

Oft have I striven, sweet month, to figure thee,
    As dreamers of old time were wont to feign,
    In living form of flesh, and striven in vain;
Yet when some sudden old-world mystery
        Of passion fired my brain,
Thy shape hath flashed upon me like no dream,
    Wandering with scented curls that heaped the breeze,
Or by the hollow of some reeded stream
    Sitting waist-deep in white anemones;

And even as I glimpsed thee thou wert gone,
    A dream for mortal eyes too proudly coy,
    Yet in thy place for subtle thought’s employ
The golden magic clung, a light that shone
        And filled me with thy joy. 
Before me like a mist that streamed and fell
    All names and shapes of antique beauty passed
In garlanded procession with the swell
    Of flutes between the beechen stems; and last,

I saw the Arcadian valley, the loved wood,
    Alpheus stream divine, the sighing shore,
    And through the cool green glades, awake once more,
Psyche, the white-limbed goddess, still pursued,
    Fleet-footed as of yore,
The noonday ringing with her frighted peals,
    Down the bright sward and through the reeds she ran,
Urged by the mountain echoes, at her heels
    The hot-blown cheeks and trampling feet of Pan.

DISTANCE

To the distance!  Ah, the distance! 
  Blue and broad and dim! 
Peace is not in burgh or meadow,
  But beyond the rim.

Aye, beyond it, far beyond it;
  Follow still my soul,
Till this earth is lost in heaven,
  And thou feel’st the whole.

THE BIRD AND THE HOUR

The sun looks over a little hill
  And floods the valley with gold—­
        A torrent of gold;
And the hither field is green and still;
  Beyond it a cloud outrolled,
  Is glowing molten and bright;
And soon the hill, and the valley and all,
        With a quiet fall,
  Shall be gathered into the night.