The Vision of Sir Launfal Part 6

She doeth little kindnesses, Which most leave undone, or despise; For naught that sets one heart at ease, And giveth happiness or peace, Is low-esteemed in her eyes. 20

She hath no scorn of common things, And, though she seem of other birth, Round us her heart entwines and clings, And patiently she folds her wings To tread the humble paths of earth. 25

Blessing she is: G.o.d made her so, And deeds of week-day holiness Fall from her noiseless as the snow, Nor hath she ever chanced to know That aught were easier than to bless. 30

She is most fair, and thereunto Her life doth rightly harmonize; Feeling or thought that was not true Ne'er made less beautiful the blue Unclouded heaven of her eyes. 35

She is a woman: one in whom The spring-time of her childish years Hath never lost its fresh perfume, Though knowing well that life hath room For many blights and many tears. 40

I love her with a love as still As a broad river's peaceful might, Which, by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet doth ever flow aright. 45

And, on its full, deep breast serene, Like quiet isles my duties lie; It flows around them and between, And makes them fresh and fair and green, Sweet homes wherein to live and die. 50

THE CHANGELING

I had a little daughter, And she was given to me To lead me gently backward To the Heavenly Father's knee, That I, by the force of nature, 5 Might in some dim wise divine The depth of his infinite patience To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her, But to me she was wholly fair, 10 And the light of the heaven she came from Still lingered and gleamed in her hair; For it was as wavy and golden, And as many changes took, As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples 15 On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover?

How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, And dimpled her wholly over, 20 Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her veins to me!

She had been with us scarce a twelve-month, 25 And it hardly seemed a day, When a troop of wandering angels Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari But loosed the hampering strings, 30 And when they had opened her cage-door, My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling, A little angel child, That seems like her bud in full blossom, 35 And smiles as she never smiled: When I wake in the morning, I see it Where she always used to lie, And I feel as weak as a violet Alone 'neath the awful sky. 40

As weak, yet as trustful also; For the whole year long I see All the wonders of faithful Nature Still worked for the love of me; Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, 45 Rain falls, suns rise and set, Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, 50 I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to 55 Transfigures its golden hair.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and s.h.i.+ver to be gone!

How s.h.i.+mmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills 5 The bowl between me and those distant-hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

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; 'T is 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 c.o.c.k's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Pa.s.sed 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, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits. 35

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the s.h.i.+ngly s.h.a.gbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a 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.

He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, 'mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, With distant eye broods over other sights, 60 Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, 65 After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky: The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the suns.h.i.+ne h.o.a.rded 'neath her favoring eye. 70

The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush: The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze 75 Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is ma.s.sed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed, weaves A p.r.i.c.kly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders s.h.i.+ne.

Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, 85 Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the plough-boy's foot, Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires, Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires; 90 In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

Below, the Charles, a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, 95 Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond-- Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, 100 From every season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare; Each change of storm or suns.h.i.+ne scatters free On them its largess of variety, For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare. 105

In spring they lie one broad expanse of green, O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet: Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen, There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet; And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd, 110 As if the silent shadow of a cloud Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.

All round, upon the river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; 115 Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to glide.

In summer 't is a blithesome sight to see, 120 As, step by step, with measured swing, they pa.s.s, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the wiry gra.s.s; Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing 125 A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of bra.s.s.

Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink.

Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, 130 A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer 'mid his crops.

Another change subdues them in the fall, But saddens not; they still show merrier tints, 135 Though sober russet seems to cover all; When the first suns.h.i.+ne through their dew-drops glints, Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across, Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss, As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy prints. 140

Or come when sunset gives its freshened zest, Lean o 'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill, While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west, Glow opposite;--the marshes drink their fill And swoon with purple veins, then, slowly fade 145 Through pink to brown, as eastward moves the shade, Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darkening hill.

Later, and yet ere winter wholly shuts, Ere through the first dry snow the runner grates, And the loath cart-wheel screams in slippery ruts, 150 While firmer ice the eager boy awaits, Trying each buckle and strap beside the fire, And until bedtime plays with his desire, Twenty times putting on and off his new-bought skates;--

Then, every morn, the river's banks s.h.i.+ne bright 155 With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail, By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night, 'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail, Giving a pretty emblem of the day When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, 160 And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's cramping mail.

And now those waterfalls the ebbing river Twice every day creates on either side Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they s.h.i.+ver In gra.s.s-arched channels to the sun denied; 165 High flaps in sparkling blue the far-heard crow, The silvered flats gleam frostily below, Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the gla.s.sy tide.

But crowned in turn by vying seasons three, Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; 170 This glory seems to rest immovably,-- The others were too fleet and vanis.h.i.+ng; When the hid tide is at its highest flow, O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything. 175

The suns.h.i.+ne seems blown off by the bleak wind, As pale as formal candles lit by day; Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind; The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, 180 White crests as of some just enchanted sea, Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised midway.

But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant.

From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt, 185 And the roused Charles remembers in his veins Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost, That tyrannous silence on the sh.o.r.es is tost In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns.