’Tis time to sing of roses! of roses all ablow! 
  They come again, as sweet, my dear, as those of long ago. 
’Tis time to sing of roses! for June is here you know.

PRAIRIE

Where yesterday rolled long waves of gold
  Beneath the burnished blue of the sky,
A silver-white sea lies still and cold,
  And a bitter wind blows by.

But nothing passes the door all day,
  Though my watching eyes grow worn and dim,
Save a lean, grey wolf that swings away
  To the far horizon rim.

Then, one by one, the stars glisten out
  Like frozen tears on a purple pall—­
The darkness folds my cabin about
  And the snow begins to fall.

I will make a hearth-fire red and bright
  And set a light by the window pane
For one who follows the trail to-night
  That will bring him home again.

Love will ride with him my heart to bless—­
  Joy will out-step him across the floor—­
What matters the great white loneliness
  When we bar the cabin door?

THE CLIMBER

He stood alone on Fame’s high mountain top,
  His hands at rest, his forehead bound with bay;
And yet he watched with eyes unsatisfied
  The downward winding way.

The great procession of the stars went by
  Far overhead, beyond the mountain’s rim,
But the unconquered worlds of time and space,
  As nothing were to him.

There from his vantage ground, so still and high,
  He watched the storm clouds when they rolled below,
And felt the wind mount up to where he stood
  Amid eternal snow.

And sometimes in the valleys and the plains
  He saw the little children at their play;
In cottage homes he saw the candle-light
  Gleam out at close of day.

But he and loneliness kept feast and fast,
  The while with weary eyes, by night and day;
They watched the path that led to common things—­
  The downward winding way.

“’Twas there,” he said, “that gladness passed me by,
  In yonder valley, where I sought the truth;
And there, a few leagues up the rocky slope,
  I said good-bye to Youth.

“There, where the pine trees catch the sun’s last gold,
  Love reached its hands to me and bade me stop;
Oh, madness of the ones who climb,” he said,
  “Up to the mountain top!”

THE DAISY

An angel found a daisy where it lay
  On Heaven’s highroad of transparent gold,
And, turning to one near, he said, “I pray,
  Tell me what manner of strange bloom I hold. 
You came a long, long way—­perchance you know
In what far country such fair flowers blow?”

Then spoke the other:  “Turn thy radiant face
And gaze with me down purple depth of space. 
See, where the stars lie spilled upon the night,
Like amber beads that hold a yellow light. 
Note one that burns with faint yet steady glow;
It is the Earth—­and there these blossoms grow. 
Some little child from that dear, distant land
Hath borne this hither in his dimpled hand.”