reeze
Of April valleys sooms and sways;
On slopes that dip to quiet seas
Through far, faint drifts of yellowing haze.
I lie like one who, in a dream
Of sounds and splendid coloured things,
Seems lifted into life supreme
And has a sense of waxing wings.
For through a great arch-light which floods
And breaks and spreads and swims along
High royal-robed autumnal woods,
I hear a glorious sunset song.
But, ah, Euterpe! I that pause
And listen to the strain divine
Can never learn its words, because
I am no son of thine.

How sweet is wandering where the west
Is full of thee, what time the morn
Looks from his halls of rosy rest
Across green miles of gleaming corn!

How sweet are dreams in shady nooks,
When bees are out, and day is mute,
While down the dell there floats the brook's
Fine echo of thy marvellous lute!

And oh, how sweet is that sad tune
Of thine, within the evening breeze,
Which roams beneath the mirrored moon
On silver-sleeping summer seas!

How blest are they whom thou hast crowned,
Thy priests--the lords who understand
The deep divinity of sound,
And live their lives in Wonderland!

These stand within thy courts and see
The light exceeding round thy throne,
But I--an alien unto thee--
I faint afar off, and alone.

II

In hills where the keen Thessalonian
Made clamour with horse and with horn,
In oracular woods the Dodonian--
The mystical maiden was born.
And the high, the Olympian seven,
Ringed round with ineffable flame,
Baptized her in halos of heaven,
And gave her her beautiful name.
And Delphicus, loving her, brought her
Immutable dower of dreams,
And clothed her with glory, and taught her
The words of the winds and the streams.

She dwelt with the echoes that dwell
In far immemorial hills;
She wove of their speeches a spell--
She borrowed the songs of the rills;
And anthems of forest and fire,
And passionate psalms of the rain
Had life in the life of the lyre,
And breath in its infinite strain.

In a fair, in a floral abode,
Of purple and yellow and red,
The voice of her floated and flowed,
The light of her lingered and spread,
And ever there slipt through the bars
Of the leaves of her luminous bowers,
Syllables splendid as stars,
And faultless as