Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/123

Rh The aspiring forests island the great gulf,

Primeval growths; soon in dark solitudes

He entered 'mid impenetrable shades,

By trunk and arch of nature's majesty,

The haunts of primal awe, man's earliest dread.

Ah, never had he felt such loneliness

Assail him, nor his soul so isolate

And lost in nature's vast, as in the hush

And shadow of that many-centuried wood!

It seemed coeval with creation's morn.

Monarchs of time stood there, like stem and limb

From Lebanon or Himalaya brought,

Hoar cedar, tall pines, dim sequoias huge

That still on earth salute the stars and winds

As equals, mixing with the heavenly roof;

So stood this forest grove majestical,

O'erblown with leafy flora of the vale,

In immemorial secular growth obscure.

The abode of unimaginable peace

Life seemed within the valley, and the soul

An alien in that natural paradise.

Sounding remote as reefs on unseen seas

He heard the long-drawn soughing of the pine

Begin, and die away down the dark trail

In the dense wild; there, brooding what should be,

He rounded pillared rocks, and found a shelf