TO A MOUNTAIN

To thee, O father of the stately peaks, Above me in the loftier light to thee, Imperial brother of those awful hills, Whose feet are set in splendid spheres of flame,

Whose heads are where the gods are, and

whose sides

Of strength are belted round with all the

zones

Of all the world, I dedicate these songs. And if, within the compass of this book, There lives and glows one verse in which there beats

The pulse of wind and torrent - if one line

Is here that like a running water sounds, And seems an echo from the lands of leaf, Be sure that line is thine. Here, in this home,

Away from men and books and all the schools,

I take thee for my Teacher. In thy voice Of deathless majesty, I, kneeling, hear God's grand authentic gospel! Year by

year,

The great sublime cantata of thy storm Strikes through my spirit-fills it with a

life

Of startling beauty! Thou my Bible art With holy leaves of rock, and flower, and tree,

And moss, and shining runnel. From each page

That helps to make thy awful volume, I
Have learned a noble lesson. In the psalm
Of thy grave winds, and in the liturgy
Of singing waters, lo! my soul has heard
The higher worship; and from thee, in-
deed,

The broad foundations of a finer hope
Were gathered in; and thou hast lifted

up

The blind horizon for a larger faith.
Moreover, walking in exalted woods
Of naked glory, in the green and gold
Of forest sunshine, I have paused like one
With all the life transfigured: and a flood
Of life ineffable has made me feel

As felt the grand old prophets caught

away

The silver fountains sing forever. Far
Above dim ghosts of waters in the caves,
The royal robe of morning on thy head
Abides forever! Evermore the wind

Is thy august companion; and thy peers
Are cloud, and thunder, and the face sublime
Of blue mid-heaven! On thy awful brow
Is Deity; and in that voice of thine
There is the great imperial utterance
Of God forever; and thy feet are set
Where evermore, through all the days and

years,

There rolls the grand hymn of the deathless

wave.

COOGEE

SING the song of wave-worn Coogee, Coogee in the distance white,

With its jags and points disrupted, gaps and fractures fringed with light; Haunt of gledes, and restless plovers of the melancholy wail,

Ever lending deeper pathos to the melancholy gale.

There, my brothers, down the fissures, chasms deep and wan and wild, Grows the sea-bloom, one that blushes like a shrinking, fair, blind child; And amongst the oozing forelands many a glad green rock-vine runs, Getting ease on earthy ledges, sheltered from December suns.

Often, when a gusty morning, rising cold

and gray and strange,

Lifts its face from watery spaces, vistas full with cloudy change, Bearing up a gloomy burden which anon begins to wane,

Fading in the sudden shadow of a dark determined rain,

Do I seek an eastern window, so to watch

the breakers beat

Round the steadfast crags of Coogee, dim with drifts of driving sleet: Hearing hollow mournful noises sweeping down a solemn shore,

While the grim sea-caves are tideless, and the storm strives at their core.

Often when the floating vapors fill the silent autumn leas,

Dreaming memories fall like moonlight over silent sleeping seas,

Friend of mine beyond the waters, here and there these perished days Haunt me with their sweet dead faces and their old divided ways.

You that helped and you that loved me, take this song, and when you read Let the lost things come about you, set your thoughts, and hear and heed. Time has laid his burden on uswe who wear our manhood now, We would be the boys we have been, free of heart and bright of brow,

Be the boys for just an hour, with the splendor and the speech

Of thy lights and thunders, Coogee, flying up thy gleaming beach.

Heart's desire and heart's division! who would come and say to me, With the eyes of far-off friendship, "You are as you used to be?" Something glad and good has left me here with sickening discontent,

Tired of looking, neither knowing what it was or where it went.

So it is this sight of Coogee, shining in the morning dew,

Sets me stumbling through dim summers once on fire with youth and you— Summers pale as southern evenings when the year has lost its power And the wasted face of April weeps above the withered flower.

Not that seasons bring no solace, not that time lacks light and rest,

But the old things were the dearest, and the old loves seem the best. We that start at songs familiar, we that tremble at a tone

Floating down the ways of music, like a sigh of sweetness flown,

We can never feel the freshness, never find again the mood

Left among fair-featured places, brightened of our brotherhood.

This and this we have to think of when the night is over all,

When the woods begin to perish, and the rains begin to fall.

SEPTEMBER IN AUSTRALIA

GRAY Winter hath gone, like a wearisome guest,

And, behold, for repayment, September comes in with the wind of the West

And the Spring in her raiment !

The stories of Youth, of the burden of Time,

And the death of Devotion,

Come back with the wind, and are themes of the rhyme

In the waves of the ocean.

We, having a secret to others unknown,
In the cool mountain-mosses,

May whisper together, September, alone
Of our loves and our losses.

One word for her beauty, and one for the place

She gave to the hours;

And then we may kiss her, and suffer her face

To sleep with the flowers.

the flowers,

While the forest discovers

white

On the forehead of Morning

She lightens and lingers

the Night

Are heavy with warning!

Her voice in the distance is lofty and loud Through its echoing gorges;

She hath hidden her eyes in a mantle of cloud,

And her feet in the surges !

On the tops of the hills, on the turreted

cones

Chief temples of thunder

glows,

Attuned by her fingers.

The stream from its home in the hollow hill slips

In a darling old fashion;

And the day goeth down with a song on its lips

Whose key-note is passion;

Far out in the fierce, bitter front of the sea I stand, and remember

Dead things that were brothers and sisters of thee,

Resplendent September.

The West, when it blows at the fall of the

noon

And beats on the beaches,

So filled with a tender and tremulous tune That touches and teaches;

With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,

And gleams like a dream in his face
Like a marvellous dream in his face?

THE VOICE IN THE WILD OAK

TWELVE years ago, when I could face High heaven's dome with different eyes, In days full-flowered with hours of grace, And nights not sad with sighs,

I wrote a song in which I strove

To shadow forth thy strain of woe,
Dark widowed sister of the grove -
Twelve wasted years ago.

But youth was then too young to find
Those high authentic syllables
Whose voice is like the wintering wind
By sunless mountain fells ;
Nor had I sinned and suffered then
To that superlative degree
That I would rather seek, than men,
Wild fellowship with thee.

But he who hears this autumn day

Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,
Is one whose hair was shot with gray
By grief instead of time.

He has no need, like many a bard,
To sing imaginary pain,
Because he bears, and finds it hard,
The punishment of Cain.

No more he sees the affluence

Which makes the heart of Nature glad ; For he has lost the fine first sense

Of beauty that he had.
The old delight God's happy breeze
Was wont to give, to grief has
And therefore, Niobe of trees,

His song is like thine own.

grown;

But I, who am that perished soul,
Have wasted so these powers of mine,
That I can never write that whole,
Pure, perfect speech of thine.
Some lord of words august, supreme,
The grave, grand melody demands;
The dark translation of thy theme
I leave to other hands.

Yet here, where plovers nightly call Across dim melancholy leas

Where comes by whistling fen and fall
The moan of far-off seas

A gray old Fancy often sits

Beneath thy shade with tired wings, And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits With awful utterings.

Then times there are when all the words
Are like the sentences of one
Shut in by fate from wind and birds
And light of stars and sun!
No dazzling dryad, but a dark

Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be Imprisoned, cramped in bands of bark, For all eternity.

Yea, like the speech of one aghast

At Immortality in chains,

What time the lordly storm rides past

With flames and arrowy rains: Some wan Tithonus of the wood, White with immeasurable years An awful ghost, in solitude

With moaning moors and meres !

And when high thunder smites the hill
And hunts the wild dog to his den,
Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill
And shriek from glen to glen,
As if a frightful memory whipped

More than ever you could gather—
More than ever you could glean
From our tale.

We have seen, and heard, and laughed,
As we tossed the shattered craft,
While those on board, aghast,
Every moment thought their last,
In the gale.

We tossed them like a plaything,
And rent their riven sail;
And we laughed our loud Ha! ha!
With the demons of the gale
In their ears.

We have laughed, and heard, and seen,
In the lightning's lurid sheen,

And the growling thunder's blast;
And we drowned them all at last

For their fears.