Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/23

Rh And ceased; and Nature's loneliness was there

That fills the desert where God talks with man.

Scarce was the soul reseated on her throne;

Still near the dark relapse he suffered doubt;

Still did he seem to seek remembered light,

With mortal senses wakened, seemed to hear

Some far-off rally of great souls in death

From fields of heroes fallen; and his gaze,

Loaded with all divine expectancy,

Was fastened as a spirit's where he saw

Those thunder-brows of storm; o'er him they loomed

Like mountains fanged, upon some desperate coast,

Whereto the sailor drifts with asking looks

And superstition; and upon him came

That strangeness round the heart that poets know,

And in the swift arrest of sleepless hope

Straightway he trembled; on that chain unloosed

The lightning burst in white and washing seas,

Pale-coursing floods; and, cloven with bolts oblique,

The vaporous summits swam in fiery air,

Chasm and cliff dividing; pass in pass,

Gulf after gulf, deep-trenched, interminable,