Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/102

74 With the wind and the day

I follow round the world—away! away!

Wide over lake and plain my sunlight shines

And every wave and every blade of grass

Doth know me as I pass;

And me the western sloping mountains know, and me

The far-off, golden sea.

O sea, whereon the passing sun doth lie!

O man, who watchest by that golden sea!

Grieve not, O, grieve not thou, but lift thine eye

And see me glorious in the sunset sky!

III

I love not the night

Save when the stars are bright,

Or when the moon

Fills the white air with silence like a tune.

Yea, even the night is mine

When the Northern Lights outshine,

And all the wild heavens throb in ecstasy divine;—

Yea, mine deep midnight, tho' the black sky lowers,

When the sea burns white and breaks on the shore in starry showers.

IV

I am the laughter of the new-born child

On whose soft-breathing sleep an angel smiled.

And I all sweet first things that are:

First songs of birds, not perfect as at last,—

Broken and incomplete,—

But sweet, O, sweet!

And I the first faint glimmer of a star

To the wreckt ship that tells the storm is past;

The first keen smells and stirrings of the Spring;