Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/232

POEMS OF OCCASION 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.

Not ours to parley with the whispering June,

The genii of the wood,

The shapes that lurk in solitude,

The cloud, the mounting lark, the wan and waning moon.

For thee the last time Hellas tipped her hills

With beauty; India breathed her midnight moan,

Her sigh, her ecstasy of passion's thrills,

To thee alone.

Such rapture thine, and the supremer gift

Which can the minstrel raise,

Above the myrtle and the bays,

To watch the sea of pain whereon our galleys drift.

Therefrom arose with thee that lyric cry,

Sad cadence of the disillusioned soul

That asks of heaven and earth its destiny,—

Or joy or dole. 202