No more the landscape
holds its wealth apart,
Making me poorer in my poverty,
But
mingles with my senses and my heart;
10
My own projected
spirit seems to me
In
her own reverie the world to steep;
’Tis
she that waves to sympathetic sleep,
Moving, as she is moved, each
field and hill and tree.
How
fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
15
Clasped by the
faint horizon’s languid arms,
Each
into each, the hazy distances!
The softened season
all the landscape charms;
Those
hills, my native village that embay,
In
waves of dreamier purple roll away,
20
And floating in mirage seem
all the glimmering farms.
Far
distant sounds the hidden chickadee
Close at my side;
far distant sound the leaves;
The
fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
Wanders like gleaning
Ruth; and as the sheaves 25
Of
wheat and barley wavered in the eye
Of
Boaz as the maiden’s glow went by,
So tremble and seem remote
all things the sense receives.
The
cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
Passed breezily
on by all his flapping mates, 30
Faint
and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
Southward, perhaps
to far Magellan’s Straits;
Dimly
I catch the throb of distant flails;
Silently
overhead the hen-hawk sails,
34
With watchful, measuring eye,
and for his quarry waits.
The
sobered robin, hunger-silent now,
Seeks cedar-berries
blue, his autumn cheer;
The
squirrel, on the shingly shagbark’s bough,
Now saws, now
lists with downward eye and ear,
Then
drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound,
40
Whisks
to his winding fastness underground;
The clouds like swans drift
down the streaming atmosphere.
O’er
yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
Drowse on the
crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call
Creeps
faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;
45
The single crow
a single caw lets fall;
And
all around me every bush and tree
Says
Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be,
Who snows his soft, white
sleep and silence over all.
The
birch, most shy and ladylike of trees,
50
Her poverty, as
best she may, retrieves,
And
hints at her foregone gentilities
With some saved
relics of her wealth of leaves;
The
swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,
Glares
red as blood across the sinking sun,
55
As one who proudlier to a
falling fortune cleaves.