Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/90

80 O memory-haunted eyes, that learned the light

On springtime pastures of his youth, when first,

Sweet in his blood, the bud of boyhood broke

Wide-open to the dalliance of the morn!

But here no change of season met his view,

Nor hint of birth or death; eternal seemed

The summer air, the landscape, and the sky,

And beauty without alteration found.

Before him a wide river-bottom lay,

Smooth as a floor, where clumps of elm and oak

Opened obscure and nameless solitudes,

Bathing in dawn; in undiscovered lands

Sweep such vast floods amid the fragrant wild,

And wander many a forest-mantled league

Unlooked on, till the lost explorer come,

Tracking his hopes. There plunged the Roamer down

In that far country, sunken in the West;

And all along the steep precipitous

The mobile scene made pictures as he went,

That borrowed nothing from the poet's eye;

The landscape recomposed at every step

With change kaleidoscopic, ever new,

And crag, and pass, and vistas opening heaven

Cast dreaming beauty in that air divine,

Like shadows in the stream of being flung.