the confines of eternity,
Glamour and pain,
And echoes gathered from a world of years,
Old phantoms, dim like mirage seen through tears,
But young again.

"Peace, peace," the bird sings on amid the woods,
"Peace, from the land that is the spirit's goal,--
The land that nonce may see but with his soul,--
Peace on the darkened house above the floods."
Pale constellations of the clematis,
Hark to that voice of his
That will not cease,
Swing low, droop low your spray,
Light with your white stars all the shadowed way
To peace, peace!

BACK TO THE LAND

Out in the upland places,
I see both dale and down,
And the ploughed earth with open scores
Turning the green to brown.

The bare bones of the country
Lie gaunt in winter days,
Grim fastnesses of rock and scaur,
Sure, while the year decays.

And, as the autumn withers,
And the winds strip the tree,
The companies of buried folk
Rise up and speak with me;--

From homesteads long forgotten,
From graves by church and yew,
They come to walk with noiseless tread
Upon the land they knew;--

Men who have tilled the pasture
The writhen thorn beside,
Women within grey vanished walls
Who bore and loved and died.

And when the great town closes
Upon me like a sea,
Daylong, above its weary din,
I hear them call to me.

Dead folk, the roofs are round me,
To bar out field and hill,
And yet I hear you on the wind
Calling and calling still;

And while, by street and pavement,
The day runs slowly through,
My soul, across these haunted downs,
Goes forth and walks with you.

THE SCARLET LILIES

I see her as though she were standing yet
In her tower at the end of the town,
When the hot sun mounts and when dusk comes down,
With her two hands laid on the parapet;
The curve of her throat as she turns this way,
The bend of her body--I see it all;
And the watching eyes that look day by day
O'er the flood that runs by the city wall.

The winds by the river would come and go
On the flame-red gown she was wont to wear,
And the scarlet lilies that crowned her hair,
And the scarlet lilies that grew below.
I used to lie like a wolf in his lair,
With a burning heart and a soul in thrall,
Gazing across in a fume of despair
O'er the flood that runs by the river wall.

I saw when he came with his tiger's eyes,
That held you still in the grip of their glance,
And the