Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/42

32 So were his eyes anointed with their lore,

The bones of mammoth bedded in the clay,

Reptilian birds, the horse's five-fold hoof,

The buried drift of antenatal earth,

Transparent ruin; backward spun the orb,

Whirled through the seethe and steam of fusing fire,

Metallic vapors of the molten globe,

The planetary star, the comet mist,

The sun-belt meteoric-fleece and flame;

And finer than all vision probed his thought,

Bared Nature's pulse, told the electric throb

Like his own blood, beats of ethereal force,

Laying his linger on the element.

Then, startled, he remembered what man is,

Hidden in this dark corner of chilled space,

His history with all its circumstance,

Races, religions, policies, archives

Of scriptured wisdom, monumental war,

The passing of a grain of that gray sand

That measures Nature's period,—a drop

That falls within the glacier's blue crevasse,

While the slow frozen motion creeps along

Through ages, and the sun expires in frost.

Death-cold he turned; the leaping trail abrupt

Sharp to the right struck up the mountain's face;