Among good citizens, I praise

Again a woman whom I knew and know,

A citizen whom I have seen

Most heartily, most patiently

Making God’s mind,

A citizen who, dead,

Yet shines across her white-remembered ways

As the nearness of a light across the snow....

My Celia, mystical, serene,

Laughing and kind.

And still I hear among New Hampshire trees

Her happy speech:

“Democracy is beauty’s inmost reach.”

And still her voice announces plain

The mystic gain

Of friends from adversaries and of peace from pain:

Beauty’s controlOf every soul

Surrendering in victory.

.... Well I recall how she explained to me

With sunlight on her head

When last we looked, as many times before,

Over those hundred foothills rolling like the sea.

“Where mountains are, door after door

Unlocks within me, opens wide

And leaves no difference in my heart,” she said,

“From anything outside.”

Not only Celia, speaking, taught me these

The tenets of her beauty; but her life was such

That I believed as by a palpable touch

That heals and tends.

Not better nor more learned nor more wise

In many ways than others of my friends,

Celia was happier.

Their excellencies and their destinies

Became, contributing, a part of her,

Anointed her awhile among all men

An eminent citizen,

A generous arbiter.

Not less bereaved than others of my friends,

Celia was lovelier.

And now, though something of her dies,

Her heart of love assembles and transcends

Laws, letters, personalities,

Beginnings, passages and ends.

Often I start and look beside me for the stir

Of her sweet presence come again.

I have cried out to her,

So vivid has begun

Some dear-remembered sentence in her voice.

If a deluded wakeful thrush,

Seeing a light in a window, sings to the sun,

Yet he shall soon rejoice;

When the great dawn of day

Opens a thousand windows into one.

On a path where thrushes wake—called Celia’s Way—

Time after time

She led me high among the rills.

And always when I pass again our chosen pineAnd feel upon my brow the fine

Soft pressure of an unseen web and brush

It from my face expectantly and climb

Wide-eyed into the mountains’ windy hush,

Among the green and healing hills

I have found Celia.

For the morning fills

With her and afternoon and twilight. She is always there

As sweet within me as the intimate air.

We are together still in the deep solitude

Which is the essence of all companies,

Not in its loneliness but in its brood

Of presences, the dawn chanting with birds, the trees

Translating unremembered memories

Of the returning dead.

And Celia, who has learned to die,

Is well aware—and so through her am I—

That, one by one interpreted,

All hopes and pains and powers

Are hers and mine to try

On every star, through every age.

.... And, still together, on this pageWe quote the sun-dial of the sage:

”_I number none but happy hours._”

For we remember still

The morning-hymn we heard: “Ye shall fulfill

Your destiny and joy,

Each in the other, both in that Italian boy

And he in you, like flowers in a hill.”

She said to me one day, where a hill renewed its flowers,

“How easy it would be to live and die

If we would only see the ultimate

Oneness of life, quicken

Our hearts with it and know that they who hate

And strike become by their own blow the stricken!”...

“A stranger might be God,” the Hindus cry.

But Celia says, importunate:

“Everyone must be God and you and I.”