I love the gentle music of the brook,

Its solitary, meditative song.

On every hill

Some stream has birth,

Some lyric rill,

To wake the selfish earth,

And smile and toss the heavens their shining look,

Repeat and every flash of life prolong.

In spite of play,

Along its cheerful way

It turns to rest beneath some sheltering tree

In richer beauty;

Or at call of duty

Leaps forth into a cry of ecstacy,

And sings that work is best,

In brighter colors drest

Runs on its way,

Nor longer wills to stay

Than but to see itself that it is fair,—

Thou happy brook, true brother to the air.

I fear the steady death-roar of the sea,

Its sullen, never-changing undertone;

Round all the land

It clasps its heavy strength,

A liquid band

Of world-unending length,

And ever chants a wild monotony,

A change between a low cry and a moan.

The earth is glad,

The sea alone is sad;

Its swelling surge it rolls against the shore

In mammoth anger;

Or, in weary languor,

Beaten, it whines that it can rage no more,

And sinks to treacherous rest,

While from the happy west

The sun is glad;

The sea alone is sad.

Its voice has messages nor words for me,

All, all is pitched in one low minor key.

Then take my heart upon thy dancing stream,

O tiny brook, thou bearest my heart away.

Run gently past

The breaking of the stones,

Nor yet too fast;

And on thy perfect tones

Bear thou my discord life that I may seem

A harmony for one short hour to-day.

Why wilt thou, brook,

Not check thy forward look?

Why wilt thou, brook, not make my heart thine own?

The wild commotion

Of the frantic ocean

Will madden thee and drown thy sorry moan,

And none will hear the cry;

Then run more slowly by—

Nay, for this nook

Was made for thee, my brook,

Stay with me here beneath this silver shade

And think this day for thee and me was made.

Thy present sweetness will be turned to brine;

Thou’lt hardly make one petty, paltry wave.

Lovest thou the sun?

He will not know thee there.

Is’t sweet to run,

Know thine own whence and where?

’Tis here thy joy, thy love, thy life are thine;

There thou wilt neither be, nor do, nor have.

The mighty sea

Will blindly number thee

To bear the ships, send thee to shape the shore

That thou art scorning;

Or some awful morning,

Set thee to pluck some sailor from his oar

And drink his weary life;

O fear this chance of strife!

Or what may be

Else, dead monotony.

Give o’er thy headlong haste, dwell here with me,

Why lose thyself in the vast, hungry sea?

These thoughts I cast into the wiser stream,

And lay and heard it run the hours away;

And then above

The beauty and the peace,

It sang of love;

And in that glad release

I knew my thoughts had run beyond my dream,

Had seen the laboring river and the bay.

“’Tis joy to run!

Else life would ne’er be done,

I ne’er should know the triumphing of death,

Nor its revealing;

Nor the eager feeling

Of fuller life, the promise of the breath

That fleets the open sea:

All this was given to me

Once as I won

My first great leap; the sun

I knew my king, and laughed, and since that day

I run and sing; he wills, and I obey.”