The Project Gutenberg EBook of The White Bees, by Henry Van Dyke

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Title: The White Bees

Author: Henry Van Dyke

Posting Date: May 13, 2009 [EBook #3757]
Release Date: February, 2003
First Posted: August 21, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The White Bees

by

Henry van Dyke

CONTENTS

THE WHITE BEES

NEW YEAR'S EVE

SONGS FOR AMERICA
Sea-Gulls of Manhattan
Urbs Coronata
America
Doors of Daring
A Home Song
A Noon Song
An American in Europe
The Ancestral Dwellings
Francis Makemie
National Monuments

IN PRAISE OF POETS
Mother Earth
Milton: Three Sonnets
Wordsworth
Keats
Shelley
Robert Browning
Longfellow
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Edmund Clarence Stedman

LYRICS, DRAMATIC AND PERSONAL
Late Spring
Nepenthe
Hesper
Arrival
Departure
The Black Birds
Without Disguise
Gratitude
Master of Music
Stars and the Soul
To Julia Marlowe
Pan Learns Music
"Undine"
Love in a Look
My April Lady
A Lover's Envy
The Hermit Thrush
Fire-Fly City
The Gentle Traveller
Sicily, December, 1908
The Window
Twilight in the Alps
Jeanne D'Arc
Hudson's Last Voyage

THE WHITE BEES AND OTHER POEMS

THE WHITE BEES

I

LEGEND

Long ago Apollo called to Aristaeus, youngest
of the shepherds,
Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees."
Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees.

Happy Aristaeus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free;
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his pleasure,
till the fated moment
When across his pathway came Eurydice.

Then her eyes enkindled burning love within him;
drove him wild with longing,
For the perfect sweetness of her flower-like