Both from deep wells of wonder sprang,
    Both children of the cosmic dream,
  Alike with yonder bird that sang,
    And little lives that flit and gleam;
  Sparks from the central rose of fire
    That at the heart of being burns,
  That draws the lily from the mire
    And trodden dust to beauty turns.

  Strange wand of Beauty—­that transforms
    Old dross to dreams, that softly glows
  On the fierce rainbowed front of storms,
    And smiles on unascended snows,
  That from the travail of lone seas
    Wrests sighing shell and moonlit pearl,
  And gathers up all sorceries
    In the white being of one girl.

  As in the woodland I walk

  As in the woodland I walk, many a strange thing I learn—­
  How from the dross and the drift the beautiful things return,
  And the fires quenched in October in April reburn;

  How foulness grows fair with the stern lustration
      of sleets and snows,
  And rottenness changes back to the breath and the cheek
      of the rose,
  And how gentle the wind that seems wild to each blossom
      that blows;

  How the lost is ever found, and the darkness the door
      of the light,
  And how soft the caress of the hand that to shape
      must not fear to smite,
  And how the dim pearl of the moon is drawn from the gulf
      of the night;

  How, when the great tree falls, with its empire
      of rustling leaves,
  The earth with a thousand hands its sunlit ruin receives,
  And out of the wreck of its glory each secret artist weaves

  Splendours anew and arabesques and tints on his swaying loom,
  Soft as the eyes of April, and black as the brows of doom,
  And the fires give back in blue-eyed flowers the woodland
      they consume;

  How when the streams run dry, the thunder calls on the hills,
  And the clouds spout silver showers in the laps
      of the little rills,
  And each spring brims with the morning star,
      and each thirsty fountain fills;

  And how, when the songs seemed ended, and all the music mute,
  There is always somewhere a secret tune, some string
      of a hidden lute,
  Lonely and undismayed that has faith in the flower
      and the fruit.

  So I learn in the woods—­that all things come again,
  That sorrow turns to joy, and that laughter is born of pain,
  That the burning gold of June is the gray of December’s rain.

  To A mountain spring

  Strange little spring, by channels past our telling,
  Gentle, resistless, welling, welling, welling;
  Through what blind ways, we know not whence
  You darkling come to dance and dimple—­
  Strange little spring! 
  Nature hath no such innocence,
  And no more secret thing—­
  So mysterious and so simple;