I called for love;
And at the name,
From a black sky
White lightning came.

I called for love,
Then sank abashed;
From a dumb cloud
Wild thunder crashed.

I gaze and gaze when I behold
The meadows springing green and gold.
I gaze, until my mind is naught
But wonderful and wordless thought!
Till, suddenly, surpassing wit,
Spontaneous meadows spring in it;
And I am but a glass between
Unwalked-in meadows, gold and green.

I ran to the forest for shelter
Breathless, half sobbing
I put my arms round a tree
Pillowed my head against the rough bark
Protect me, I said. I am a lost child.
But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair.
A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth
It lashed the forest together
A huge green wave burst and thundered over my head.
I prayed, implored, ‘Please take care of me.’
But the wind pulled at my cloak and the rain beat upon me.
Little rivers tore up the ground and swamped the bushes.

My Father,
Here for a moment in your light I stand,
And feel upon my lifted face
Your touch, your touch, as of a father's hand.
Shine down upon me. See,
It is so little and so brief a thing
That drinks your light, remembering
The dark that was, the dark that is to be —
So soon to be again.
O let your glance fall tenderly and mild!
Have pity now, and when
The night has taken me, have pity then,
Father, on me, your child.

Altho' the Present fruits and sums
The Past, and all the Bygone holds,
Yet ever new my soul becomes,
Not merely blossoms and unfolds.

A Mind directs the plasmic flow;
A Will inspires the plastic soul;
And ever something new I grow,
Like sequent writing on a scroll,

Where every word transmutes the last,
And by a prescient phrase is wrought,
Out of the phrases of the Past,
A new-created crescent thought.

You praise the child. I have no part
In all his vanished grace and joy;
You blame the youth; but in my heart

By my bed, on a little, round table
The Grandmother placed a candle
She gave me three kisses telling me they were three dreams
And tucked me in just where I loved being tucked.
Then she went out of the room and the door was shut.
I lay still, waiting for my three dreams to talk
But they were silent.
Suddenly I remembered giving her three kisses back
Perhaps, by mistake, I had given my three little dreams.
I sat up in bed.
The room grew — big, O bigger far than a church.
The wardrobe, quite by itself, as big as a house

Her eyes are dim, yet also bright
And wide-awake, yet natheless dreaming,
Like moonbeams on a summer night,
Athro' a nimbus softly streaming,
Or morning's liberating light,
The blind, unhappy dark redeeming.

Her eyes are bright, yet also dim,
As though with joy they had been weeping,
The lashes, broidering the brim,
Have tiny tear-drops in their keeping,
And rainbows arch from rim to rim,
And through the archway stars are peeping.

O eyes so bright, so dim, so fair,
Sunlight and moonlight intertwining,

Rivers that roll most musical in song
Are often lovely to the mind alone;
The wanderer muses, as he moves along
Their vacant banks, on glories not their own.

When, to give substance to his boyhood's dreams,
He leaves his land, far countries to survey,
Oft must he think, in greeting foreign streams,
" Their names alone are beautiful, not they. "

If chance he mark the dwindled Arno pour
A tide more meagre than his native Charles;
Or view the Rhone when summer's heat is o'er,
Subdued and stagnant in the fen of Arles;

We are the tides, fast and slow,
Bitter and sweet;
We are the tides that come and go,
Ebb and flow,
Throb and beat
In the Godhead's every vein,
Hands and feet,
And body and brain.

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: " Do not eat the poor butterfly."
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterflies would fly out of the plates
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world
And perch on the Grandmother's cap.