R NEW YORK
C LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX

TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

THE CATHEDRAL.

FAR through the memory shines a happy | Can overtake the rapture of the sense,

In that continuous redbreast boding rain :

The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm;

But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard

Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill

That threads my undivided life and steals

A pathos from the years and graves be

tween.

I know not how it is with other men,
Whom I but guess, deciphering myself;
For me, once felt is so felt nevermore.
The fleeting relish at sensation's brim
Had in it the best ferment of the wine.
One spring I knew as never any since:
All night the surges of the warm south-

west

Boomed intermittent through the shuddering elms,

And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift,

Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick

charm

Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song:

One summer hour abides, what time I perched,

That made familiar fields seem far and strange

As those stark wastes that whiten endlessly

sun:

In ghastly solitude about the pole,
And gleam relentless to the unsetting
Instant the candid chambers of my
brain
Were painted with these sovran images;
And later visions seem but copies pale
From those unfading frescos of the past,
Which I, young savage, in my age of
flint,

Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me
Parted from Nature by the joy in her
That doubtfully revealed me to myself.
Thenceforward I must stand outside the
gate;

And paradise was paradise the more,
Known once and barred against satiety.

What we call Nature, all outside our-
selves,

Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel;
The world's a woman to our shifting
mood,

Feeling with us, or making due pretence;
And therefore we the more persuade our-
selves

To make all things our thought's confederates,

Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. when our Fancy seeks analogies, Though she have hidden what she after finds,

Dappled with noonday, under simmer-So ing leaves,

And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof

An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,

Denouncing me an alien and a thief: One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest,

When in the lane I watched the ashleaves fall,

Balancing softly earthward without wind,

Or twirling with directer impulse down On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost,

While I grew pensive with the pensive

She loves to cheat herself with feigned

surprise.

I find my own complexion everywhere :
No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the
first,

A marvel to the bush it dawned upon,
The rapture of its life made visible,
The mystery of its yearning realized,
As the first babe to the first woman
born;

No falcon ever felt delight of wings
As when, an eyas, from the stolid cliff
Loosing himself, he followed his high
heart

To swim on sunshine, masterless as
wind;

And I believe the brown earth takes delight

In the new snowdrop looking back at her,

To think that by some vernal alchemy