Page:Poems, now first collected, Stedman, 1897.djvu/222

ARIEL Thyself the wild west wind, O boy divine,

Thou fain wouldst be,—the spirit which in its breath

Wooes yet the seaward ilex and the pine

That wept thy death?

Or art thou still the incarnate child of song

Who gazed, as if astray

From some uncharted stellar way,

With eyes of wonder at our world of grief and wrong?

Yet thou wast Nature's prodigal; the last

Unto whose lips her beauteous mouth she bent

An instant, ere thy kinsmen, fading fast,

Their lorn way went.

What though the faun and oread had fled?

A tenantry thine own,

Peopling their leafy coverts lone,

With thee still dwelt as when sweet Fancy was not dead;

Not dead as now, when we the visionless,

In nature's alchemy more woeful wise,

Say that no thought of us her depths possess,—

No love, her skies. 202