Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/342

POEMS OF NATURE No more the plains that lengthen west

Enshrouds, yet slowly, surely creeps

Eastward, until the coolness steeps

A darkling league of tilth and wold,

And chills the flocks that seek their fold.

Not like those ancient summits lone,

Mont Blanc, on his eternal throne,—

The city-gemmed Peruvian peak,—

The sunset-portals landsmen seek,

Whose train, to reach the Golden Land,

Crawls slow and pathless through the sand,—

Or that, whose ice-lit beacon guides

The mariner on tropic tides,

And flames across the Gulf afar,

A torch by day, by night a star,—

Not thus, to cleave the outer skies,

Does my serener mountain rise,

Nor aye forget its gentle birth

Upon the dewy, pastoral earth.

But ever, in the noonday light,

Are scenes whereof I love the sight,—

Broad pictures of the lower world

Beneath my gladdened eyes unfurled.

Irradiate distances reveal

Fair nature wed to human weal;

The rolling valley made a plain;

Its checkered squares of grass and grain;

The silvery rye, the golden wheat,

The flowery elders where they meet,—

Ay, even the springing corn I see,

And garden haunts of bird and bee;

And where, in daisied meadows, shines

The wandering river through its vines,

Move specks at random, which I know

Are herds a-grazing to and fro.

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