There is a wistful, lingering regret

Ever for those whose feet are set

On other paths than where their childhood moved,

And, having loved

The old colonial hills, no level plain,

No tangled forest, the same hope contain,

And by the northern lakes I stand unsatisfied,

Watching the tremulous shadows start and slide,

Hearing the listless waves among the stones,

And the low tones

Of a breeze that through the hemlocks creeps.

Veiled in grey ashes sleeps

The campfire, and thin streams

Of smoke float off like beckoning dreams

Of peaceful men. Around me broods

The sense of aged solitudes,

Of lonely places where

Cold winds have torn blue midnight air

And dipped beneath the edges of the leaves

To moons unchronicled.

We bring

The talk of cities and of schools,

Yet to these quiet pools,

Calm with a thousand silent morns and eves,

It seems no alien thing;

The shadows of the woods

Are brothers to our moods.

Nor less in the quick rush of vivid streets,

And libraries with long rows of mouldering thought,

Is nature, than in green retreats;

Whither from year to year

I come with eager eye and ear,

Hoping, some leafy hour, to feel,

In ways of civic feet unsought,

A secret from the brown earth steal

Into my spirit, and reveal

Some wisdom of a larger worth,

Some quiet truth of growth and birth;

If we, the kindred on the earth,

Are kindred with her, to one issue moving on

Of melancholy night or shimmering dawn,

Surely befits we wanderers wild

To her confederate breast be reconciled;

Out of her primal sleep we came,

And she still dreams; of us that hold

Such strenuous course and venture bold,

Whom such unknown ambition stirs,

Asks of our bright, unsteady flame:

What issue ours that is not hers?

How came he once to these green isles

And channels winding miles and miles,

Cross clasped in hand and pale face set,

The Jesuit, PÈre Marquette?

To sombre nations, with the blight

Of dead leaves in the blood,

The eager priest into their solitude

And melancholy mood

Flashed like a lamp at night

In sluggish sleepers' eyes;

Out of the east where mornings rise

Came like the morning into ashen skies

With the east's subtle fire and surprise,

And stern beyond his knowledge brought

A message other than he thought:

"Lo! an edict here from the throne of fate,

Whose banners are lifted and armies wait;

The fight moves on at the front, it says,

And the word hath come after many days:

Ye shall walk no more in your ancient ways."

Father, the word has come and gone,

The torpid races

Slumbered, and vanished from their places;

And in our ears intoning ring

The words of that most weary king

In Israel, King Solomon.

Over the earth's untroubled face

The restless generations pace,

Finding their graves regretfully;

Is there no crown, nor any worth,

For men who build upon the earth

What time treads down forgetfully?

Unchanged the graven statute lies,

The code star-lettered in the skies.

It is written there, it is written here;

The law that knows not far or near

Is sacrifice;

And bird and flower, and beast and tree,

Kingdom and planet wheeling free

Are sacrificed incessantly.

From dark, through dusk, toward light, we tread

On the thorn-crowned foreheads of the dead.

The law says not there is nothing lost;

It only says that the end is gain;

The gain may be at the helpless cost

Of hands that give in vain;

And in this world, where many give,

None gives the widow's mite save he

That, having but one life to live,

Gives that one life so utterly.

Thou that unknowing didst obey,

With straitened thought and clouded eye,

The law, we learn at this late day,

O PÈre Marquette, whose war is done,

Ours is the charge to bear it on,

To hold the veering banner high

Until we die,

To meet the issue in whose awe

Our kindred earth we stand above,

If knowing sacrifice is law,

We sacrifice ourselves for love.

Or are we then such stuff as fills a dream?

Some wide-browed spirit dreams us, where he stands

Watching the long twilight's stream

Below his solemn hands,

Whose reverie and shaping thought began

Before the stars in their large order ran?

Fluid we are, our days flow on,

And round them flow the rivers of the sun,

As long ago in places where

The Halicarnassian wandered with his curious eyes

On Egypt's mysteries,

And Babylonian gardens of the air

Hung green above the city wall.

If this were all, if this were all—

If it were all of life to give

Our hearts to God and slip away,

And if the end for which we live

Were simple as the close of day,

Were simple as the fathers say,

Were simple as their peace was deep

Who in the old faith fell asleep!

No night bird now makes murmur; in the trees

No drowsy chuckle of dark-nested ease.

The campfire's last grey embers fall.

With dipping prow and shallop sides

The slender moon to her mooring rides

Over the ridge of Isle La Salle,

Under the lee of the world,

Her filmy halliards coiled and thin sails furled,

And silver clouds about her phantom rudder curled.