She will be all things to all men.

She who is old, but nowise feeble,

Pours her power into the people,

Merry and manifold without bar,

Makes and moulds them what they are,

And what they call their city way

Is not their way, but hers,

And what they say they made to-day,

They learned of the oaks and firs.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh,

Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh;

She drugs her water and her wheat

With the flavors she finds meet,

And gives them what to drink and eat;

And having thus their bread and growth,

They do her bidding, nothing loath.

What’s most theirs is not their own,

But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone,

And in their vaunted works of Art

The master-stroke is still her part.

THE ROMANY GIRL

The sun goes down, and with him takes

The coarseness of my poor attire;

The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame

Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher.

Pale Northern girls! you scorn our race;

You captives of your air-tight halls,

Wear out in-doors your sickly days,

But leave us the horizon walls.

And if I take you, dames, to task,

And say it frankly without guile,

Then you are Gypsies in a mask,

And I the lady all the while.

If, on the heath, below the moon,

I court and play with paler blood,

Me false to mine dare whisper none, –

One sallow horseman knows me good.

Go, keep your cheek’s rose from the rain,

For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;

My swarthy tint is in the grain,

The rocks and forest know it real.

The wild air bloweth in our lungs,

The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,

The birds gave us our wily tongues,

The panther in our dances flies.

You doubt we read the stars on high,

Nathless we read your fortunes true;

The stars may hide in the upper sky,

But without glass we fathom you.

MY GARDEN

If I could put my woods in song,

And tell what’s there enjoyed,

All men would to my gardens throng,

And leave the cities void.

In my plot no tulips blow, –

Snow-loving pines and oaks instead;

And rank the savage maples grow

From spring’s faint flush to autumn red.

My garden is a forest ledge

Which older forests bound;

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,

Then plunge to depths profound.

Here once the Deluge ploughed,

Laid the terraces, one by one;

Ebbing later whence it flowed,

They bleach and dry in the sun.

The sowers made haste to depart, –

The wind and the birds which sowed it;

Not for fame, nor by rules of art,

Planted these, and tempests flowed it.

Waters that wash my garden side

Play not in Nature’s lawful web,

They heed not moon or solar tide, –

Five years elapse from flood to ebb.

Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,

And every god, – none did refuse;

And be sure at last came Love,