Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/344

POEMS OF NATURE Even there, a queen upon its shore,

I know the city evermore

Her palaces and temples rears,

And wooes the nations to her piers;

Yet the proud city seems a mole

To this horizon-bounded whole;

And, from my station on the mount,

The whole is little worth account

Beneath the overhanging sky,

That seems so far and yet so nigh.

Here breathe I inspiration rare,

Unburdened by the grosser air

That hugs the lower land, and feel

Through all my finer senses steal

The life of what that life may be,

Freed from this dull earth's density,

When we, with many a soul-felt thrill,

Shall thrid the ether at our will,

Through widening corridors of morn

And starry archways swiftly borne.

Here, in the process of the night,

The stars themselves a purer light

Give out, than reaches those who gaze

Enshrouded with the valley's haze.

October, entering Heaven's fane,

Assumes her lucent, annual reign:

Then what a dark and dismal clod,

Forsaken by the Sons of God,

Seems this sad world, to those which march

Across the high, illumined arch,

And with their brightness draw me forth

To scan the splendors of the North!

I see the Dragon, as he toils

With Ursa in his shining coils,

And mark the Huntsman lift his shield,

Confronting on the ancient field 314