Page:Under the Sun.djvu/121

Rh the helm himself when the great east wind began to blow its fiercest, steered straight for the island where the daughters of old Hesperus the Wise guarded the tree with the golden fruit. It is a December poem, and yet the scene of it is laid in a land where the boughs were blossomed and “unknown flowers bent down before their feet;” where there were the lilies of spring in the grass, the fruit of autumn on the trees, and, over all, the warm light of a summer sun. Well for the poet that his song was of olden times! The reader is content in his December tale to take him at his word, to see wade off from the shingle the man

And afterwards to see him at the foot of the golden-fruited tree, in the land of roses and singing-birds, standing where

We see him pick the red-gleaming apples, note the branch spring back, and then watch him, with the round fruit in his hand, go down across the lawn, dappled with flowers and fallen fruit, to the Tyrian ship again.

We “Asian folk” have indeed heard of a land where, by some pantomime of nature, roses are winter flowers and fruit ripen in December, where there are singing-birds instead of old cock-robins and turkeys, and where