Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

SPOILS OF THE DEAD

SPOILS OF THE DEAD

Two fairies it was
On a still summer day
Came forth in the woods
With the flowers to play.

The flowers they plucked
They cast on the ground
For others, and those
For still others they found.

Flower-guided it was
That they came as they ran
On something that lay
In the shape of a man.

The snow must have made
The feathery bed
When this one fell
On the sleep of the dead.

But the snow was gone
A long time ago,
And the body he wore
Nigh gone with the snow.

The fairies drew near
And keenly espied
A ring on his hand
And a chain at his side.

They knelt in the leaves
And eerily played
With the glittering things,
And were not afraid.

And when they went home
To hide in their burrow,
They took them along
To play with to-morrow.

When you came on death,
Did you not come flower-guided
Like the elves in the wood?
I remember that I did.

But I recognised death
With sorrow and dread,
And I hated and hate
The spoils of the dead.

PAN WITH US

PAN WITH US

Pan came out of the woods one day,—
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,—
And stood in the sun and looked his fill
At wooded valley and wooded hill.

He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.
That was well! and he stamped a hoof.

His heart knew peace, for none came here
To this lean feeding save once a year
Someone to salt the half—wild steer,
Or homespun children with clicking pails
Who see so little they tell no tales.

He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach
A new-world song, far out of reach,
For a sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech
And the whimper of hawks beside the sun
Were music enough for him, for one.

Times were changed from what they were:
Such pipes kept less of power to stir
The fruited bough of the juniper
And the fragile bluets clustered there
Than the merest aimless breath of air.