Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/72

IN WAR TIME Save as they rise with the moon-drawn sea,

Twice in the day, continuously.

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Gray with an inward struggle grown,

The brooding lawyer, Hermann Van Ghelt,

Lived at the mansion-house, alone;

But a chilling cloud at his bosom felt,

Like the fog which crept, at morn and night,

Across the rivers in his sight,

And rising, left the moorland plain

Bare and spectral and cold again.

He saw the one tall hill, which stood

Huge with its quarry and gloaming wood,

And the creeping engines, as they hist

Through the dim reaches of the mist,—

Serpents, with ominous eyes aglow,

Thridding the grasses to and fro;

And he thought how each dark, receding train

Carried its freight of joy and pain,

On toil's adventure and fortune's quest,

To the troubled city of unrest;

And he knew that under the desolate pall

Of the bleak horizon, skirting all,

The burdened ocean heaved, and rolled

Its moaning surges manifold.

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Often at evening, gazing through

The eastward windows on such a view,

Its sense enwrapt him as with a shroud;

Often at noon, in the city's crowd,

He saw, as 't were in a mystic glass,

Unbidden faces before him pass:

A soldier, with eyes unawed and mild

As the eyes of one who was his child;

A woman's visage, like that which blest 42