Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/220

POEMS OF OCCASION The robin's voice, the humble-bee's wise drone;

Nor are we yet bereft

Of one whose sagas ever at his will

Can answer back the ocean, tone for tone.

But he whose quickened eye

Saw through New England's life her inmost spirit,—

Her heart, and all the stays on which it leant,—

Returns not, since he laid the pencil by

Whose mystic touch none other shall inherit!

What though its work unfinished lies? Half-bent

The rainbow's arch fades out in upper air;

The shining cataract half-way down the height

Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell

On listeners unaware,

Ends incomplete, but through the starry night

The ear still waits for what it did not tell.

AD VATEM

! the Land that loves thee, she whose child

Thou art,—and whose uplifted hands thou long

Hast stayed with song availing like a prayer,—

She feels a sudden pang, who gave thee birth

And gave to thee the lineaments supreme

Of her own freedom, that she could not make

Thy tissues all immortal, or, if to change,

To bloom through years coeval with her own;

So that no touch of age nor frost of time

Should wither thee, nor furrow thy dear face,

Nor fleck thy hair with silver. Ay, she feels

A double pang that thee, with each new year,

Glad Youth may not revisit, like the Spring

That routs her northern Winter and anew

Melts off the hoar snow from her puissant hills.

She could not make thee deathless; no, but thou, 190