Or south, it still is clear;

Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;

Or west, no thunder fear.

The musing peasant lowly great

Beside the forest water sate;

The rope-like pine roots crosswise grown

Composed the network of his throne;

The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,

Was burnished to a floor of glass,

Painted with shadows green and proud

Of the tree and of the cloud.

He was the heart of all the scene;

On him the sun looked more serene;

To hill and cloud his face was known, –

It seemed the likeness of their own;

They knew by secret sympathy

The public child of earth and sky.

‘You ask,’ he said, ‘what guide

Me through trackless thickets led,

Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide?

I found the water’s bed.

The watercourses were my guide;

I travelled grateful by their side,

Or through their channel dry;

They led me through the thicket damp,

Through brake and fern, the beavers’ camp,

Through beds of granite cut my road,

And their resistless friendship showed;

The falling waters led me,

The foodful waters fed me,

And brought me to the lowest land,

Unerring to the ocean sand.

The moss upon the forest bark

Was polestar when the night was dark;

The purple berries in the wood

Supplied me necessary food;

For Nature ever faithful is

To such as trust her faithfulness.

When the forest shall mislead me,

When the night and morning lie,

When sea and land refuse to feed me,

’Twill be time enough to die;

Then will yet my mother yield

A pillow in her greenest field,

Nor the June flowers scorn to cover

The clay of their departed lover.’

MAY-DAY

Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,

With sudden passion languishing,

Maketh all things softly smile,

Painteth pictures mile on mile,

Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,

Whence a smokeless incense breathes.

Girls are peeling the sweet willow,

Poplar white, and Gilead-tree,

And troops of boys

Shouting with whoop and hilloa,

And hip, hip, three times three.

The air is full of whistlings bland;

What was that I heard

Out of the hazy land?

Harp of the wind, or song of bird,

Or clapping of shepherd’s hands,

Or vagrant booming of the air,

Voice of a meteor lost in day?

Such tidings of the starry sphere

Can this elastic air convey.

Or haply ’t was the cannonade

Of the pent and darkened lake,

Cooled by the pendent mountain’s shade,

Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,

Afflicted moan, and latest hold

Even into May the iceberg cold.

Was it a squirrel’s pettish bark,

Or clarionet of jay? or hark,

Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,

Steering north with raucous cry

Through tracts and provinces of sky,

Every night alighting down

In new landscapes of romance,

Where darkling feed the clamorous clans

By lonely lakes to men unknown.

Come the tumult whence it will,

Voice of sport, or rush of wings,

It is a sound, it is a token