A stream of magic through the heart of night
Its unseen passage cleaves;
Into the darkened room below the eaves
It falls from out the woods upon the height,
A strain of ecstasy
Wrought on 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.
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