Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/106

96 And pauses not. Thy moment live!" He ceased

And brightly leaped the fountain of his blood

Recurrent; joy revisited his eyes,

And beauty on his senses stole anew,

Not now ideal, the pattern of the gods,

But earthly, with the dyes and stains of time.

A deeper bloom, a more mysterious glow

Burned in the hollows of the wilderness

In whose rich glooms he sank; in that wide land

A loftier melancholy ruled,—it lay

So beautiful, so desolate, so alone,

Like a deserted paradise, grown wild.

Noon-weirdness came out of the mounded hills;

A glamour lay on the dim roll of plains,

Whose far horizons he should never cross;

And endless seemed the reaches of the waste,

Calling him ever to its unknown heart

Afar; and on his soul prophetic fell

The shadow of a yonder world, not ours,

Where man is not, nor any human thought,

Nor norm of truth or beauty or delight,

But the great globe, untenanted of mind,

Pure nature, rolls in the ethereal void;

And deeper glowed the dye in the dark rose,

And more fantastic now the orchid sprawled

Its errant beauty, and on wandering thoughts