Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/444

416 And when first the adventurer heard a whole, great blossoming linden

Humming, with honey-gathering bees, like the pluckt string of a violin.

VII

O, there's no place like the old place!

Mightier mountains there are, sky-piercing and snow-covered all the year round,

But the lion-like curve of Cobble, clear-cut against the southern heavens,

On still, cold nights heaves close to the thick stars;

And the white ways of the Galaxy I have seen start from the lion's head

And sweep over to the long mountain, as if all the light and glory were for the valley only.

Day and night, in sunlight and starlight, and in the light of the moon,

Beautiful, beautiful is the valley of brooks.

Travelers have said that in the whole earth there is none more beautiful.

Why have I stayed away so long?

I think I will come again and again before I die—

And perhaps after I have died; for in the white graveyard on the hill

Rest, in the long sleep, some whom one day I should like to join.

I wonder shall I seem to them as strange as now to me

The image of my own self as I was in the days of childhood:

An image that haunts me hourly while here I wander and dream,

And makes me strange to myself in a curious double existence.