of Breath. 
     Nor ever, says he who heard,
     Heard Earth in her boundaries broad,
     From bosom of singer or bird
     A sweetness thus rich of the God
     Whose harmonies always are sane. 
     She sang of furrow and seed,
     The burial, birth of the grain,
     The growth, and the showers that feed,
     And the green blades waxing mature
     For the husbandman’s armful brown. 
     O, the song in its burden ran pure,
     And burden to song was a crown. 
     Callistes, a singer, skilled
     In the gift he could measure and praise,
     By a rival’s art was thrilled,
     Though she sang but a Song of Days,
     Where the husbandman’s toil and strife
     Little varies to strife and toil: 
     But the milky kernel of life,
     With her numbered:  corn, wine, fruit, oil
     The song did give him to eat: 
     Gave the first rapt vision of Good,
     And the fresh young sense of Sweet
     The grace of the battle for food,
     With the issue Earth cannot refuse
     When men to their labour are sworn. 
     ’Twas a song of the God of the Muse
     To the forehead of Morn.

     IX

     Him loved she.  Lo, now was he veiled: 
     Over sea stood a swelled cloud-rack: 
     The fishing-boat heavenward sailed,
     Bent abeam, with a whitened track,
     Surprised, fast hauling the net,
     As it flew:  sea dashed, earth shook. 
     She said:  Is it night?  O not yet! 
     With a travail of thoughts in her look. 
     The mountain heaved up to its peak: 
     Sea darkened:  earth gathered her fowl;
     Of bird or of branch rose the shriek. 
     Night? but never so fell a scowl
     Wore night, nor the sky since then
     When ocean ran swallowing shore,
     And the Gods looked down for men. 
     Broke tempest with that stern roar
     Never yet, save when black on the whirl
     Rode wrath of a sovereign Power. 
     Then the youth and the shuddering girl,
     Dim as shades in the angry shower,
     Joined hands and descended a maze
     Of the paths that were racing alive
     Round boulder and bush, cleaving ways,
     Incessant, with sound of a hive. 
     The height was a fountain-urn
     Pouring streams, and the whole solid height
     Leaped, chasing at every turn
     The pair in one spirit of flight
     To the folding pineforest.  Yet here,
     Like the pause to things hunted, in doubt,
     The stillness bred spectral fear
     Of the awfulness ranging without,
     And imminent.  Downward they fled,
     From under the haunted roof,
     To the valley aquake with the tread
     Of an iron-resounding hoof,
     As of legions of thunderful horse
     Broken loose and in line tramping hard. 
     For the rage of a hungry force
     Roamed blind of its