Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/92

82 Reincarnations of our glorious dust,

Loaded his sight! tall peak and brooding sky

Peopled his mind with long since vanished shapes

Of classic woe and mythic mystery,

That spoke the tongues of unrecorded time,—

Antique religion, dark with human fate.

What lands, what ages there stretched out the world!

One tract was full of echoes of the dead,

Thick with deep valleys of tranquillity

After life's labor done, and dim with hills,

Where the pine whispered to the whispering plane,

And shepherd unto shepherd loved and sang.

All the selectest moments of his life

Seemed there upgathered in their visible form.

Ay me! how far it rolled, that golden haze!

Here Fontainebleau opened its woodlands warm;

There Brittany chanted its pastorals;

Lone oleanders in the gullies flamed;

Now every blossom starred the summer grass,

And now the wild path through the wild shrub ran;

And, as the long striped grasses of the sea

Breathe odors on the pure and saline air

Sweet-scented, fragrance roused him, rich and keen,

Where rounded masses of exotic bloom

Rivalled in vain the morning flowers of song.

"O rose, in which Hafiz had lodged the world!"