Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/340

POEMS OF NATURE Far from the darkness of the city's cloud

Which hangs above us like the pall of Death.

Haste, let us leave the shadow of his wings!

Off from our cares, a stolen, happy time!

Come where the skies are blue, the uplands green;

For hark! the robin sings

Even here, blithe herald, his auroral rhyme,

Foretelling joy, and June his sovereign queen.

See, in our pavèd courts her missal scroll

Is dropped astealth, and every verdant line,

Emblazoned round with Summer's aureole,

Pictures to eager eyes, like thine and mine,

Her trees new-leaved and hillsides far away.

Ransom has come: out from this vaulted town,

Poor prisoners of a giant old and blind,

Into the breezy day,

Fleeing the sights and sounds that wear us down,

And in the fields our ancient solace find!

Again I hunger for the living wood,

The laurelled crags, the hemlocks hanging wide,

The rushing stream that will not be withstood,

Bound forward to wed him with the river's tide:

O what wild leaps through many a fettered pass,

Through knotted ambuscade of root and rock,

How white the plunge, how dark the cloven pool!

Then to rich meadow-grass,

And pastures fed by tinkling herd and flock,

Till the wide stream receives its waters cool.

Again I long for lakes that lie between

High mountains, fringed about with virgin firs,

Where hand of man has never rudely been,

Nor plashing wheel the limpid water stirs;

There let us twain begin the world again

Like those of old; while tree, and trout, and deer 310