Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/55

 Before thy universal shrine

To feel the invoked presence hovering near,

He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit hours

Spent on the roads of wandering solitude

Have set their sober impress on his brow,

And he, with harmonies of wind and wood

And torrent and the tread of mountain showers,

Has mingled many a dedicative vow

That holds him, till thy last delight be known,

Bound in thy service and in thine alone.

I, too, among the visionary throng

Who choose to follow where thy pathway leads,

Have sold my patrimony for a song,

And donned the simple, lowly pilgrim's weeds.

From that first image of beloved walls,

Deep-bowered in umbrage of ancestral trees,

Where earliest thy sweet enchantment falls,

Tingeing a child's fantastic reveries

With radiance so fair it seems to be

Of heavens just lost the lingering evidence

From that first dawn of roseate infancy,

So long beneath thy tender influence

My breast has thrilled. As oft for one brief second

The veil through which those infinite offers beckoned

Has seemed to tremble, letting through

Some swift intolerable view

Of vistas past the sense of mortal seeing,

So oft, as one whose stricken eyes might see 5