ROCKED as in some fairy boat,

By swift fancy set afloat,

’Twixt the oceans, blue and green,

Of grass beneath, and sky serene,

Where the streams of dusk and day

Meet and mingle, far away,

On the universal tide,

Still with time and life to glide.

Boat, that, pendent ’mid the trees,

Swingeth moored, yet sails the seas,

Stem and stern from east to west,

Bound upon an unknown quest,

Past the marge of night and day,

Blanched or strewn with starry spray;

By the oar-strokes of the blood,

On the windings of the flood,

Shadowed by the summer wood,

Dusk with dreams yon leaves that play

With the falling blooms of May.

Like the web the Fates do spin

Helpless man to cradle in—

Hung, with life, upon a thread,

Here I swing, and, o’er my head,

Maze of apples, boughs and leaves,

Meshed wherein, my thought enweaves

Tapestry, phantasmic, strange,

Shot with shifting dyes of change:

So my shallow bark and frail

Spreads a rich emblazoned sail,

Filled, as now the summer breeze

Fans my brain and stirs the trees,

Where, a hidden heart of fire,

Strives the moon in her desire

Still to pierce the leafy fret

Her celestial seat to get.

Cynthia’s self that silver shape,

Boskage dark, she doth escape,

Long her gleaming body hid

Doth naked, glorious, emerge

Upon the lucent starry verge.

Let me linger in the wood,

Hear the sound of pipings rude,

Watch the shapes of nymph and fawn,

Centaurs fleet across the lawn,

Satyrs brown, in rhythmic dance,

By the stream great Pan, perchance,

Hidden in the vocal reed—

All the happy antique breed.

I would turn again the book,

Yet again to steal a look,

Back to where Time’s firstling ran—

Arboreal ancestral man:

Wooing shy his dusky mate,

Wild-eyed, half articulate:

In his rude canoe, askance,

See him poise his flint-tipped lance,

Flashing in the ardent noon

O’er the sedgy broad lagoon,

When Thames reeds the river-horse

Crushed in his unconscious force.

Basking in the primal sun

Recked he how his race should run?

How, for forest night of trees,

Cities spreading, dense as these,

Where the shade of gilded pride,

Starved and savage men, should hide

Human vampires, hawks and flies,

Gliding snakes and lustrous eyes,

Dainty beauty, plumaged fair,

Hollow masks for smiling care,

Hopeless toil that smileth not,

Misery, untold, forgot—

Where the throng of fashion flaunts,

Where, in dark unwholesome haunts,

Lurks a darker race, to prowl

Desert streets when night doth scowl,

Desert stoney streets, and bare,

’Neath a strange electric glare,

Fiery eyed to track them down,

Homeless on the heartless town.

Ah! could early man, or late,

Set his ways, or Nature’s, straight,

Who life’s stream doth careless pour,

Lets the cup brim o’er and o’er,

With the chosen skim the cream,

Struggle with the ravening swine,

For residue, or helpless whine,

Lazarus at Dives’ gate,

Dives at his feast of state,

Rising with a hungry heart,

As, one by one, life’s guests depart.

Could we chain those monsters up

That on human lives do sup—

Shameless lust of rule and gold,

Lawless greed grown overbold,

Vice and drink with palsied hand

Riding down the joyless land—

Then, if humanity could be

From these, and other tyrants, free

To win its bread—to win, I wot,

Vine, and fig, and breathing plot,

Joy in work, and joy in leisure,

Love and art to fill life’s measure,

Force and fraud might vainly rage

To see, new born, the golden age.

Sailing thus, as thought doth steer,

Fancy flutt’ring at the prow,

Sirens singing soft and low,

From the opal shores and streams,

Where they dye the cloth of dreams—

From the present and the past

Have I touched the land at last!

Voyaging the world around

Yet anchored still to English ground.