Whitsuntide
Out from the city's flaming heart,
Miles but a dozen away,
I know of a mountain's secret shrine,
Where lately I went to pray.
But my prayer was not for the smallest boon:
It was nothing but thanks and joy,
As I roamed through the scented woodland paths,
With the heart of a happy boy;
As I touched the tips of the maple-boughs,
Shaded with softest brown;
As the thistle showed me her armature,
Frosted with silvery down.
And, oh! the gleam of the birches' stems,
And the new green of the pines,
And the hemlock fringes sweeping low,
Till they touched the creeping vines!
And every bank was studded thick
With wild flowers sweet and rare;
While the ferns seemed made of spirit-stuff,
They were so slight and fair.
And the city was gleaming far away
Through a veil of thin white mist,
And billows of green rolled in between,
Till the land and the water kissed.
It was only a dozen miles away,
As flies the laden bee,
But to my free thought 'twas a hundred leagues,
And more, to the shining sea.
Could it be, I thought, in the world with this
There was dust and heat and glare?
Could it be there was sorrow and hate and sin,
And terror and wild despair?
Alas! it could; but for this one day
I would live as if it could not;
I would dream that the world, from end to end,
Was only this one dear spot.
All should be sweet and cool and pure;
All should be gay and free;
All men be as gentle, all women as true
As the man and the woman with me.
They had lived with the birds and the flowers so long
They seemed to have learned their speech:
Softer it fell on my drowsy sense
Than the rain on a sandy beach.
They could call the trees and the flowers by name;
They could tell me of all their times;
And their talk was a poem that needed not
The help of a poet's rhymes.
Where was the service that day, think you?
Down in the valley below,
Where the sweet-toned bell of the village church
Was swinging to and fro;
Or was it there, on the mountain-side,
Where the Spirit, with two or three,
Was saying softly, in various speech,
“Let the little ones come unto me?”
Miles but a dozen away,
I know of a mountain's secret shrine,
Where lately I went to pray.
But my prayer was not for the smallest boon:
It was nothing but thanks and joy,
As I roamed through the scented woodland paths,
With the heart of a happy boy;
As I touched the tips of the maple-boughs,
Shaded with softest brown;
As the thistle showed me her armature,
Frosted with silvery down.
And, oh! the gleam of the birches' stems,
And the new green of the pines,
And the hemlock fringes sweeping low,
Till they touched the creeping vines!
And every bank was studded thick
With wild flowers sweet and rare;
While the ferns seemed made of spirit-stuff,
They were so slight and fair.
And the city was gleaming far away
Through a veil of thin white mist,
And billows of green rolled in between,
Till the land and the water kissed.
It was only a dozen miles away,
As flies the laden bee,
But to my free thought 'twas a hundred leagues,
And more, to the shining sea.
Could it be, I thought, in the world with this
There was dust and heat and glare?
Could it be there was sorrow and hate and sin,
And terror and wild despair?
Alas! it could; but for this one day
I would live as if it could not;
I would dream that the world, from end to end,
Was only this one dear spot.
All should be sweet and cool and pure;
All should be gay and free;
All men be as gentle, all women as true
As the man and the woman with me.
They had lived with the birds and the flowers so long
They seemed to have learned their speech:
Softer it fell on my drowsy sense
Than the rain on a sandy beach.
They could call the trees and the flowers by name;
They could tell me of all their times;
And their talk was a poem that needed not
The help of a poet's rhymes.
Where was the service that day, think you?
Down in the valley below,
Where the sweet-toned bell of the village church
Was swinging to and fro;
Or was it there, on the mountain-side,
Where the Spirit, with two or three,
Was saying softly, in various speech,
“Let the little ones come unto me?”
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