Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/168

POEMS OF OCCASION Old, young, with outstretched hand, with eager eye,

Fast follow where her winged sandals fly,

While by some witchery unto each she seems

His dearest hope, the spirit of his dreams.

Ah, me! how like those dupes of Pleasure's chase,

Yet how unlike, we left our starting-place!

Is there not something nobler, far more true,

In the Ideal, still before our view,

Upon whose shining course we followed far

While sank and rose the night and morning star?

Ever we saw a bright glance cast behind

Or heard a word of hope borne down the wind,—

As yet we see and hear, and follow still

With faithful hearts and long-enduring will.

In what weird circle has the enchantress led

Our footsteps, so that now again they tread

These walks, and all that on the course befell

Seems to ourselves a shadow and a spell?

Was it the magic of a moment's trance,

A scholar's day-dream? Have we been, perchance,

Like that bewildered king who dipped his face

In water—while a dervish paused to trace

A mystic phrase—and, ere he raised it, lived

A score of seasons, labored, journeyed, wived

In a strange city,—Tunis or Algiers,—

And, after what had seemed so many years,

Came to himself, and found all this had been

During the palace-clock's brief noonday din?

For here the same blithe robins seem to house

In the elm-forest, underneath whose boughs

We too were sheltered; nay, we cannot mark

The five-and-twenty rings, beneath the bark,

That tell the growth of some historic tree,

Since we, too, were a part of Arcady.

And in our trance, negari, should the bell 138