embrace: 
     The moss-root smell where beeches grew,
     And watered grass in breezy space;
     The silken heights, of ghostly bloom
     Among their folds, by distance draped. 
     ’Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,
     That cried to have its chaos shaped: 
     Absorbing, little noting, still
     Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;
     With wistful looks on each far hill
     For something hidden, something owed. 
     Unto his mantled sister, Day
     Had given the secret things we sought
     And she was grave and saintly gay;
     At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;
     She flew on it, then folded wings,
     In meditation passing lone,
     To breathe around the secret things,
     Which have no word, and yet are known;
     Of thirst for them are known, as air
     Is health in blood:  we gained enough
     By this to feel it honest fare;
     Impalpable, not barren, stuff.

     A pride of legs in motion kept
     Our spirits to their task meanwhile,
     And what was deepest dreaming slept: 
     The posts that named the swallowed mile;
     Beside the straight canal the hut
     Abandoned; near the river’s source
     Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;
     The roadway missed; were our discourse;
     At times dear poets, whom some view
     Transcendent or subdued evoked
     To speak the memorable, the true,
     The luminous as a moon uncloaked;
     For proof that there, among earth’s dumb,
     A soul had passed and said our best. 
     Or it might be we chimed on some
     Historic favourite’s astral crest,
     With part to reverence in its gleam,
     And part to rivalry the shout: 
     So royal, unuttered, is youth’s dream
     Of power within to strike without. 
     But most the silences were sweet,
     Like mothers’ breasts, to bid it feel
     It lived in such divine conceit
     As envies aught we stamp for real.

     To either then an untold tale
     Was Life, and author, hero, we. 
     The chapters holding peaks to scale,
     Or depths to fathom, made our glee;
     For we were armed of inner fires,
     Unbled in us the ripe desires;
     And passion rolled a quiet sea,
     Whereon was Love the phantom sail.

     At the close

     To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
     Who straightway sound the call to arms.  Thou know’st;
     And that black spot in each embattled host,
     Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal. 
     Now is it red artillery and white steel;
     Till on a day will ring the victor’s boast,
     That ’tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,
     Where Thy rejected grovels under heel. 
     So in all times of man’s descent insane
     To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,
     Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow. 
     But at the close he entered Thy domain,
     Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like
     He tore the fall’n, the Eternal was his Foe.