Yea, were these all, 't were well to let them go;

For idle gold is but an empty gain: An empire, reared on ashes of its foe, Falls, as have fallen the island-walls of Spain.

Treasure is dust. build On better things. Our gain is in the loss:

They need it not who

In love and tears, self victories fulfilled, In manhood bending to the bitter cross.

In burdens that make wise the bearer, wounds

Taken in hate that sanctify the heart, In sympathies and sorrows, and in sounds

That up from all the open waters start;

O DAPPLED throat of white! Shy, hidden bird!

Perched in green dimness of the dewy wood,

And murmuring, in that lonely, lover mood,

Thy heart-ache, softly heard, Sweetened by distance, over land and lake.

Why, like a kinsman, do I feel thy voice
Awaken voices in me free and sweet?
Was there some far ancestral birdhood
fleet

That rose and would rejoice:
A broken cycle rounded in a song?

The lake, like steady wine in a deep cup, Lay crystal in the curving mountain deeps;

And now the air brought that long lyric up That sobs, then falls and weeps, And hushes silence into listening hope.

Is it that we were sprung of one old kin, Children of brooding earth, that lets us tell,

Thou from thy rhythmic throat, I deep within,

These syllables of her spell, This hymned wisdom of her pondering years?

For thou hast spoken song-wise in a tongue
I knew not till I heard the buried air
Burst from the boughs and bring me
what thou sung,

Here where the lake lies bare
To reaching summits and the azure sky.

Thy music is a language of the trees,
The brown soil, and the never-trodden
brake;

Translatress art thou of dumb mysteries

That dream through wood and lake; And I, in thee, have uttered what I am!

A PINE-TREE BUOY

WHERE all the winds were tranquil,
And all the odors sweet,
And rings of tumbling upland
Sloped down to kiss your feet:

There, in a nest of verdure,

You grew from bud to bough; You heard the song at mid-day,At eve the plighted vow.

But fate that gives a guerdon

Takes back a double fee: She hewed you from your homestead And set you in the sea.

And every bowling billow

Bends down your barren head
To hearken if the whisper
Of what you knew is dead.

THE SEARCH

but at best it is a pale reflection of the truth.

bo.

soul of the world is itself abroad to-night.

I neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor touch it, but faintly I feel it powerfully stirring.

I feel it as the blind heaving sea feels the moon bending over it.

I feel it as the needle feels the serpentine magnetic current coiling itself about the earth.

All that shall I call it illusion? Nay,

to the heart universal, for the soul of the world is abroad to-night.