The teasel and the horsemint spread
 The hillsides, as with sunset sown,
 Blooming along the Standing-Stone
 That ripples in its rocky bed:
 There are no treasuries that hold
 Gold yellower than the marigold
 That crowds its mouth and head.
’T is harvest-time: a mower stands
 Among the morning wheat and whets
 His scythe, and for a space forgets
 The labor of the ripening lands;
 Then bends, and through the dewy grain
 His long scythe hisses, and again
 He swings it in his hands.
And she beholds him where he mows
 On acres whence the water sends
 Faint music of reflecting bends
 And falls that interblend with flows:
 She stands among the old bee-gums,—
 Where all the apiary hums,—
 Like some sweet bramble-rose.
She hears him whistling as he leans,
 And, reaping, sweeps the ripe wheat by;
 She sighs and smiles and knows not why:—
 These are but simple country scenes:
 He whets his scythe again, and sees
 Her smiling near the hives of bees
 Beneath the flowering beans.
The peacock-purple lizard creeps
 Along the rail; and deep the drone
 Of insects makes the country lone
 With summer where the water sleeps:
 She hears him singing as he swings
 His scythe; he thinks of other things—
 Not toil, and, singing, reaps.

IV

Into the woods they went again,
 Over the wind-blown oats;
 Out of the acres of golden grain,
 In where the light was a violet stain,
 In where the lilies’ throats
 Were brimmed with the summer rain.
Hung on a bough a reaper’s hook,
 Over the wind-blown oats;
 A girl’s glad laugh and a girl’s glad look,
 And the hush and ripple of tree and brook,
 And a wild bird’s silvery notes,
 And a kiss that a strong man took.
Out of the woods the lovers went,
 Over the wind-waved wheat;
 She with a face, where love was blent,
 Like to an open testament;
 He, from his head to feet,
 Dazed with his hope that was eloquent.
Here how oft had they come to tryst,
 Over the wind-waved wheat!
 Here how oft had they laughed and kissed!
 Talked and tarried where no one wist,
 Here where the woods are sweet,
 Dim and deep as a dewy mist.

V

Her pearls are blossoms-of-the-vale,
 Her only diamonds are the dews;
 Such jewels never can grow stale,
 Nor any value lose.
Among the millet beards she stands:
 The languid wind lolls everywhere:
 There are wild roses in her hands,
 One wild rose in her hair.
To-morrow, where the shade is warm,
 Among the unmown wheat she’ll stop,
 And from one daisy-loaded arm
 One ox-eyed daisy drop.
She’ll meet his brown eyes, true and brave,
 With blue eyes, false yet dreamy sweet:
 He is her lover and her slave,
 Who mows among the wheat.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

When buds broke on the apple trees
 She wore an apple-blossom dress,
 And laughed with him across the leas,
 And love was all a guess.
When goose-plums ripened in the rain,
 Plum-colored was her gown of red;
 He kissed her in the creek-road lane—
 She was his life, he said.
When apples thumped the droughty land,
 A russet color was her gown:
 Another came, and—won her hand?—
 Nay! carried off to town....
When grapes hung purple in the hot,
 None missed her and her simple dress,
 Save one, whom, haply, she forgot,
 Who loved her none the less.
When snow made white each harvest sheaf,
 He sought her out amid her show;
 Her rubies, redder than the leaf
 That autumn forests sow.
Not one regret her shame reveals;
 She smiles at him, then puts him by;
 He pleads; and she? she merely steels
 Her heart and—lives her lie.

VI

And he returned when poppies strewed
 Their golden blots o’er moss and leaf,—
 Blond little Esaus of the wood,
 So fair of face, of life so brief.—
 Did he forget?—Not he, in truth!—
 “No month,” he thought, “holds so much grace,
 No month of spring, such grace and youth,
 As the sweet April of her face.”
In fall the frail gerardia
 Hung hints of sunset and of dawn
 On root and rock, as if to draw
 Her lips, remind him of one gone:—
 Of one unworthy, in pursuit
 Of butterflies, who does not dream
 A flower, broken by her foot,
 Sweeps, helpless, with her down the stream.

SOME SUMMER DAYS

I

If you had seen her waiting there
 Among the tiger-lily blooms,—
 That sowed their jewels everywhere
 Among the woodland gleams and glooms,—
 You had confessed her very fair,
 And sweeter than the wood’s perfumes.
A country girl with bare brown feet,
 She waits, while day slopes down the deeps:
 The afternoon is dead with heat,
 And all the weary shadow sleeps
 Like toil, arm-pillowed in the wheat,
 Beside the scythe with which he reaps.
There is no sound more distant than
 The cow-bell on the vine-hung hill;
 No nearer than the locust’s span
 Of noise that makes the silence shrill:
 And now there comes a sun-browned man
 Through tiger-lilies of the rill.
Long will they talk: till, in the end,
 The clear west glows, the east grows pale;
 Until the glow and pallor blend
 Like moonlight on a shifting sail;
 And then he ’ll clasp her; she will bend
 Her head, consenting. Day will fail:
The west will flame, then fade away
 Through heavy orange, rose, and red,
 And leave the heavens violet gray
 Above a gypsy-lily bed:
 Then they will go; and he will say
 Such words to her as none has said.
A million stars the night will win
 Above them; and one firefly
 Pulse like a tangled starbeam in
 The cedar dark against the sky:
 Then he will lift her dimpled chin
 And take the kiss she ’ll not deny.
And when the moon, like the great book
 Of Judgment, golden with the light
 Of God, lies open o’er yon nook
 Of darkest wood and wildest height,
 Together they will cross the brook
 And reach the gate and kiss good night.

II

And now he wipes his hand along
 The beaded fire of his brow
 Hard toil has heated; and the strong
 Face flushes fuller health as now
 He fills his hay-fork to the prong,
 And, tossing it, again doth bow.
And now he rests, and looks away
 Across the sun-fierce hills and meads
 No rolling cloud has cooled to-day;
 And from his face the brawny beads
 Drip; and he marks the heaps of hay,
 The fields of corn, the fields of weeds.
At last he sees the tempest build
 Black battlements along the west,
 Black breastworks that are thunder filled;
 And bares his brow; and on his chest
 The sweat of toil is cooled; and stilled
 The pulse of toil within his breast.
A strong wind brings the odorous death
 Of far hay-meadows, and the scent
 Is good within his nostrils’ breath:
 The mighty trees are bowed, that leant
 For no man, as when Power saith
 “Bow down!” and stalwart men are bent.
He laughs, long-gazing as he goes
 Along the elder-sweetened lane:
 He feels the storm wind as it blows
 Across the sheaves of golden grain,
 And stops to pull one bramble-rose,
 And watch the swiftly coming rain.
And there, ’mid locust trees, the farm
 Dreams in a martin-haunted place:
 He marks the far-off streaks of storm
 That, driven of the thunder, race:
 He sees his child upon her arm,
 And in the door his wife’s fair face.

III

Below the sunset’s range of rose,
 Below the heaven’s bending blue,
 Down woodways where the balsam blows,
 And milkweed tufts hang, gray of hue,
 A Jersey heifer stops and lows—
 The cows come home by one, by two.
There is no star yet: but the smell
 Of hay and pennyroyal mix
 With herb-aromas of the dell;
 And the root-hidden cricket clicks:
 Among the ironweeds a bell
 Clangs near the rail-fenced clover-ricks.
She waits upon the slope beside
 The windlassed well the plum-trees shade,
 The well-curb that the goose-plums hide;
 Her light hand on the bucket laid,
 Unbonneted she waits, glad-eyed,
 Her dress as simple as her braid.
She sees fawn-colored backs among
 The sumacs now; a tossing horn;
 A clashing bell of brass that rung:
 Long shadows lean upon the corn,
 And all the day dies scarlet-stung,
 The cloud in it a rosy thorn.
Below the pleasant moon, that tips
 The tree-tops of the hillside, fly
 The evening bats; the twilight slips
 Some fireflies like spangles by;
 She meets him, and their happy lips
 Touch; and one star leaps in the sky.
He takes her bucket, and they speak
 Of married hopes while in the grass
 The plum lies glowing as her cheek;
 The patient cows look back or pass;
 And in the west one golden streak
 Burns like a great cathedral glass.

IV

The skies are amber, blue, and green
 Before the coming of the sun;
 And all the deep hills sleep, serene
 As if enchanted; every one
 Is ribbed with morning mists that lean
 On woods through which vague whispers run.
Birds wake: and on the vine-hung knobs,
 Above the brook, a twittering
 Confuses songs; one warbler robs
 Another of its note; a wing
 Beats by; and now a wild throat throbs
 Triumphant; all the woodlands sing.
The sun is up: the hills are heaped
 With instant splendor; and the vales
 Surprised with shimmers that are steeped
 In purple where the thin mist trails;
 The water-fall, the rock it leaped,
 Are burning gold that foams and fails.
He drives his horses to the plow
 Along the vineyard slopes, where bask
 Dew-heavy grapes, half-ripened now,
 In sun-shot shafts of shade: no mask
 Of joy he wears; his face and brow
 Glow as he enters on his task.
Before him, soaring through the mist,
 The gray hawk wildly wings and screams;
 Its dewy back gleams, sunbeam-kissed,
 Above the wood that drips and dreams;
 He guides the plow with one strong fist;
 The soil rolls back in level seams.
Packed to the right the sassafras
 Lifts leafy walls of spice that shade
 The blackberries, whose tendrils mass
 Big berries in the coolness made;
 And drop their ripeness on the grass
 Where trumpet-flowers fall and fade.
White on the left the fence and trees
 That mark the garden; and the smoke,
 Uncurling in the early breeze,
 Tells of the roof beneath the oak;
 He turns his team, and, turning, sees
 The damp, dark soil his coulter broke.
Bees hum; and o’er the berries poise
 Lean-bodied wasps; loud blackbirds turn
 Following the plow: there is a noise
 Of insect wings that buzz and burn;—
 And now he hears his wife’s low voice,
 The song she sings to help her churn.

V

There are no clouds that drift around
 The moon’s pearl-kindled crystal, (white
 As some sky-summoned spirit wound
 In raiment lit with limbs of light),
 That have not softened like the sound
 Of harps when Heaven forgets to smite.
The vales are deeper than the dark,
 And darker than the vales the woods
 That shadowy hill and meadow mark
 With broad, blurred lines, whereover broods
 Deep calm; and now a fox-hound’s bark
 Upon the quietude intrudes.
And though the night is never still,
 Yet what we name its noises makes
 Its silence:—now a whippoorwill;
 A frog, whose hoarser tremor breaks
 The hush; then insect sounds that fill
 The night; an owl that hoots and wakes.
They lean against the gate that leads
 Into the lane that lies between
 The yard and orchard; flowers and weeds
 Smell sweeter than the odors keen
 That day distils from hotness; beads
 Of dew make cool the gray and green.
Their infant sleeps. They feel the peace
 Of something done that God has blessed,
 Still as the pulse that will not cease
 There in the cloud that lights the west:
 The peace of love that shall increase
 While soul to soul still gives its best.

AN EPIC OF SOUTH-FORK

I

The wild brook gleams on the sand and ripples
 Over the rocks of the riffle; brimming
 Under the elms like a nymph who dripples,
 Dips and glimmers and shines in swimming:
 Under the linns and the ash-trees lodging,
 Loops of the limpid waters lie,
 Shaken of schools of the minnows, dodging
 The glancing wings of the dragon-fly.
Lower, the loops are lines of laughter
 Over the stones and the crystal gravel;
 Afar they gloom, like a face seen after
 Mirth, where the waters slowly travel;
 Shadowy slow where the Fork is shaken
 Of the dropping bark of the sycamore,
 Where the water-snake, that the footsteps waken,
 Slides like a crooked root from shore.
Peace of the forest; and silence, dimmer
 Than dreams. And now a wing that winnows
 The willow leaves, with their shadows slimmer
 In the shallow there than a school of minnows:
 Calm of the creek; and a huge tree twisted,
 Ringed, and turned to a tree of pearl;
 A gray-eyed man, who is farmer-fisted,
 And a dark-eyed, sinewy country girl.
The brow of the man is gnarled and wrinkled
 With the weight of the words that have just been spoken;
 And the girl has smiled and her eyes have twinkled,
 Though the bonds and the bands of their love lie broken:
 She smiles, nor knows how the days have knotted
 Her to the heart of the man who says:
 “Let us follow the paths that we think allotted.
 I will go my ways and you your ways.
“And the man between us is your decision.
 Worse or better he is your lover.—
 Shall I say he ’s worse since the sweet Elysian
 Prize he wins where I discover
 Only the hell of the luckless chooser?—
 Shall I say he ’s better than I, or more,
 Since he is winner and I am loser,
 His life ’s made rich and mine made poor?”
“I tell you now as I oft and ever
 Have told,” she answered, the laughter dying
 Down in her eyes, “that his arms have never
 Held me!—no!—but you think me lying,
 And you are wrong. And I think it better
 To part forever than still to dwell
 With the sad distrust, like an evil tetter,
 On our lives forever, and so farewell.”
And she turned away; and he watched her going,
 The girlish pride in her eyes a-smoulder:
 He saw her go, and his lips were glowing
 Fever that parched. And he stood, one shoulder
 Slouched to the tree; and he saw her stooping,
 There by the bank, with a reckless foot;
 Straighten; and tear from her breast his drooping
 Lilies and fasten the pleurisy-root.
With its orange fire he saw her passing
 On and on; and the blood beat, burning
 His brain to madness; and seemingly massing
 The weight of the world on his heart in yearning ...
 Butterflies swarmed in the moist sand-alleys;
 A fairy fleet of Ionian sails
 They seemed with their wings, or of pirate galleys,
 Maroon and yellow, for Elfland gales.
He watched her going; and harder, thicker
 The pulse of his breath and his heart’s hard throbbing.—
 How should he know that her heart was sicker?
 How should he know that her soul was sobbing?—
 She never looked back: and he saw her vanish
 In swirls of the startled butterflies,
 Like a storm of flowers; and he could not banish
 The thought he had lost his all through lies.

II

He heard the cocks crow out the lonely hours.
 How long the night! how far away the dawn!
 It seemed long months since he had seen the flowers,
 The leaves, the sunlight, and the bee-hived lawn;
 Had heard the thrush flute in the tangled showers.
His burning eyes ached, staring at the black
 Stolidity of midnight. Would God send
 No cool relief unto his mind,—a rack
 Of inquisition,—tortures to unbend,
 That stretched him forward and now strained him back?
Incomprehensible and undivulged,
 The thought that took him back, retraced their walks,
 Through woods, on which the sudden perfumes bulged,
 The bird-songs and the brilliant-blossomed stalks;
 And all the freedom which their talk indulged.
Oh, strong appeal! And he would almost yield;
 When, firmly forward, he could feel her fault
 Oppose the error of a rock-like shield,
 And to resisting phalanxes cry halt—
 And, lo! bright cohorts broken on the field.
O mulct of morning! to the despot night
 Count down unminted gold, and let the day
 Walk free from dungeons of the dark; delight
 Herself on mountains of the violet ray,
 Clad in white maidenhood and morning white!
A melancholy coast, plunged deep in dream
 And death and silence, stretched the drowsy dark,
 Wherein he heard a round-eyed screech-owl scream,
 In lamentation, and a watch-dog bark,
 Vague as oblivion, lost in night’s deep stream.
And then hope moved him to divide the blinds
 To see if those bright sparkles were a star’s,
 Or but his feverish eyelids, which the mind’s
 Commotion weighed.—No hint of morning bars
 With glimmer heaven’s swart tapestry he finds.
So he remained, impatient, till the first
 Exploring crevices of Aztec morn,
 Dim cracks of treasure, Eldorados burst:
 Then could he face his cowardice and scorn
 His jealousy that thus his life had cursed.
Love knew no barriers now. And where he went
 Each woodland path was musical with birds;
 Each flow’r was richer, more divine of scent;
 For love sought love with such expressive words
 That dawn’s delivery was less eloquent.

III

Who is it hunts with his dog
 There where the heron is flying
 Gray through the feathering fog
 Over the Fork, where is lying,
 Bridge-like, a butternut log,
 There where the horsemint is drying?
Who is it hunts in the brush,
 Under the linns and the beeches,
 Here where the water-falls rush,
 Dark, where the noon never reaches?
 Here where the Fork is one crush
 Of flags with a bloom like the peach’s?
He is handsome and supple and tall,
 Blond-haired and vigorous-chested,
 Blue-eyed as the bud by the fall
 Where he listens,—his rifle half rested,
 Half leaned on the crumbling stone wall,—
 Whose briers he lately has breasted.
He waits; and the sun on the dew
 Of the cedars and leaves of the bushes
 Strikes glittering frostiness through ...
 If a covey of partridges flushes
 What good will a Winchester do,
 Or the dog to his feet that he crushes?
Then a man breaks strong through the weeds
 Where the buck-bushes toss and the spires
 Of the white-blossomed cohosh; ’mid reeds
 Wild-carrots, and trammelling briers:
 It is he! to his loved one who speeds—
 And the man in the bushes—he fires....
From leaves of the wind-shaken wood
 The dew of the dawn is still falling:
 He is gone from the place where he stood,
 Just there where the black crow is calling:
 There is blood on the weeds: is it blood
 On the face of the man who is crawling?
Red blood or a smudge of the dawn?—
 Now he lies with his gray eyes wide, staring,
 Stiff, still at the sun: he has drawn
 His limbs in a heap: and the faring
 Bee-martins light near or pass on,
 Not one of them knowing or caring.
It is noon: and the wood-dove is deep
 In the calm of its cooing: and over
 The tops of the forest trees sweep
 The shadows of buzzards that hover:
 Wide-winged they sail on as asleep:
 And the bob-white is whistling from cover.
It is dusk: and the heat, that made wilt
 The leaves and the wildflowers’ faces,
 Gives place to the dew-drops that tilt
 With coolness the weeds where are traces
 Of horror and darkness and guilt,
 That nothing can wash from those places.
It is night: and the hoot-owlet mocks
 The dove of the day with wild weeping,
 The Fork is scarce heard on its rocks
 Where the man is so quietly sleeping:
 Through the woods snaps the bark of a fox;
 The lightning is fitfully leaping.

IV

All day, ’twixt hope and fear,
 She waited at the gate,
 Looking for him, more dear
 Now that he made her wait:
 Day went and night draws near:
 Stormy it grows and late.
Still, still she waits: great limbs
 The winds rend from the ridge;
 Each swollen shallow swims
 Head-deep below the bridge;
 The drift, that breaks and brims
 Swirls lighter than the midge.
The night grows wildly gray
 With lightning-litten rain;
 The forests sound and sway,
 An oak is rent in twain;
 The thunder rolls away
 Like some vast bolt and chain.
The Fork is whirling wreck
 Of field and farm and wood;
 And many a foaming fleck
 Drives where the rock-fence stood;—
 A torrent sweeps break-neck
 Above the washed-out blood.
Night deepens: still she waits
 Expectant in despair:
 The Fork has reached the gates,
 The wood’s wreck everywhere.
 But when the storm abates,
 She thinks, he will be there.
She sees the lightning rush
 Its blazing hells above;
 She hears the thunder crush
 Heaven as if earthquake-clove—
 Loud in the tempest’s hush
 She calls with all her love.
He comes, she feels; and stands
 The rushing waters o’er
 Her feet, and on her hands
 And hair the wild down-pour,
 The lightnings are wild brands
 To light him to her door.
Night deepens: but she knows
 God will not fail to send
 Her love to soothe her woes,
 And one day’s errors mend.—
 The wild stream foams and flows
 Booming in fall and bend.
Again the lightnings light
 The night like some wild torch;
 The waters foam and fight;
 And one uprooted larch
 Sweeps down, with something white
 Wedged in it, by her porch.
She stoops: the lurid rain
 Beats on her back and head—
 Ay! he hath come again!
 With livid lips once red!
 A bullet in his brain
 The night hath brought him—dead!

A NIELLO

I

It is not early spring and yet
 Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
 And blotted banks of violet,
 My heart will dream.
Is it because the wind-flower apes
 The beauty that was once her brow,
 That the white thought of it still shapes
 The April now?
Because the wild-rose learned its blush
 From her fresh cheeks of maidenhood,
 Their thought makes June of barren brush
 And empty wood?
And then I think how young she died—
 Straight, barren death stalks down the trees,
 The hard-eyed hours by his side
 That kill and freeze.

II

When orchards are in bloom again
 My heart will bound, my blood will beat,
 To hear the red-bird so repeat,
 On boughs of rosy stain,
 His blithe, loud song,—like some far strain
 From out the past,—among the bloom,—
 (Where bee, and wasp, and hornet boom)—
 Fresh, redolent with rain.
When orchards are in bloom once more,
 Invasions of lost dreams will draw
 My feet, like some insistent law,
 Through blossoms to her door:
 In dreams I’ll ask her, as before,
 To let me help her at the well;
 And fill her pail; and long to tell
 My love as once of yore.
I shall not speak until we quit
 The farm-gate, leading to the lane
 And orchard, all in bloom again,
 ’Mid which the wood-doves sit
 And coo; and through whose blossoms flit
 The cat-birds crying while they fly:
 Then tenderly I’ll speak, and try
 To tell her all of it.
And in my dream again she’ll place
 Her hand in mine, as oft before,—
 When orchards are in bloom once more,—
 With all her old-time grace:
 And we will tarry till a trace
 Of sunset dyes the heav’ns; and then—
 We’ll part, and, parting, I again
 Will bend and kiss her face.
And homeward, dreaming, I will go
 Along the cricket-chirring ways,
 While sunset, like one crimson blaze
 Of blossoms, lingers low:
 And my lost youth again I’ll know,
 And all her love, when spring is here—
 Hers! hers! now dead this many a year
 Whose love still haunts me so.

III

I would not die when Springtime lifts
 The white world to her maiden mouth,
 And heaps its cradle with gay gifts,
 Breeze-blown from out the singing South:
 Too full of life and loves that cling,
 Too heedless of all mortal woe,
 The young, unsympathetic Spring,
 That death should never know.
I would not die when Summer shakes
 Her daisied locks below her hips,
 And, naked as a star that takes
 A cloud, into the silence slips.
 Too rich is Summer; poor in needs;
 Wrapped in her own warm loveliness
 Her pomp goes by, and never heeds
 If one be more or less.
But I would die when Autumn goes,
 The sad rain dripping from her hair,
 Through forests where the wild wind blows
 Death and the red wreck everywhere:
 Sweet as love’s last farewells and tears
 ’T would be to die, when heavens are gray,
 In the old autumn of my years,
 Like a dead leaf borne far away.

DEEP IN THE FOREST

I

SPRING ON THE HILLS

Ah, shall I follow, on the hills,
 The Spring, as wild wings follow?
 Where wild-plum trees make wan the hills,
 Crab-apple trees the hollow,
 Haunts of the bee and swallow?
In red-bud brakes and flowery
 Acclivities of berry;
 In dogwood dingles, showery
 With dew, where wrens make merry?
 Or drifts of swarming cherry?
In valleys of wild-strawberries,
 And of the clumped May-apple;
 Or cloud-like trees of hawberries,
 With which the south-winds grapple,
 That brook and pathway dapple?
With eyes of far forgetfulness,—
 Like some white wood-thing’s daughter,
 Whose feet are bee-like fretfulness,—
 To see her run like water
 Through boughs that slipped or caught her.
O Spring, to seek, yet find you not,
 To search and still continue;
 To glimpse, to touch, but bind you not,
 To lose and then to win you,
 All sweet evasion in you.
In pearly, peach-blush distances
 You gleam; the woods are braided
 Of myths, of dream-existences;—
 There, where the brook is shaded,
 Some splendor surely faded.
O presence, like the primrose’s,
 Once more I feel your power!
 In rainy scents of dim roses
 I breathe you for an hour,
 Elusive as a flower.

II

THE WOOD SPIRIT