When the wind sings, these mellow days,
What old, half-silenced chords awake;
And when I dream, the dream betrays
No future path my feet must take;

But leaving here a vacant nest,
On backward-gliding pinion fast,
My soul retracks the toilsome quest
That shaped my present from my past.

Like yonder birds that flit afar,
When autumn lays their coverts bare;
Ingathering wide from wold and scar
They take their flight, and know not where.

They know not that their course is laid
Where others fared in aeons dead,
But follow onward unafraid,
Nor guess what guide those wanderings led.

Here, where the pathway devious veered,
Once towered a peak above the lea;
There, silvery firths, their flight that steered,
Flow now beneath the trackless sea.

Yet still, by some vague impulse bent,
They thrid the maze; and as they fly,
The shores of some lost continent
Are etched upon the sunset sky.

Even so, to Thee who wert the goal
Of all I was in days of yore,
Across the whelming tides that roll
Of time and chance and change, once more

My eager fancies blindly turn
On paths I trod in buried years;
Towards Thee again my longings yearn,
And my long-vanished self appears.