  THE BUILDERCOME and let me make thee glad In this house that I have made! Nowhere (I am unafraid!) Canst thou find its like on Earth: Come, and learn the perfect worth Of the labor I have had. I have fashioned it for thee, Every room and pictured wall; Every marble pillar tall, Every door and window-place; All were done that thy fair face Might look kindlier on me. Here, moreover, thou shalt find Strange, delightful, far-brought things: Dulcimers, whose tightened strings Once dead women loved to touch; (Deeming they could mimic much Of the music of the wind!) Heavy candlesticks of brass; Chess-men carved of ivory; Mass-books written perfectly By some patient monk of old; Flagons wrought of thick, red gold, Set with gems and colored glass; Burnished armor, once some knight (Dead, I deem, long years ago!) Its great strength was glad to know When his lady needed him: (Now that both his eyes are dim Both his sword and shield are bright!) Come, and share these things with me, Men have died to leave to us! We shall find life glorious In this splendid house of love; Come, and claim thy part thereof,— I have fashioned it for thee! LET us bury him here, Where the maples are red! He is dead, And he died thanking God that he fell with the fall of the leaf and the year. Where the hillside is sheer, Let it echo our tread Whom he led; Let us follow as gladly as ever we followed who never knew fear. Ere he died they had fled; Yet they heard his last cheer Ringing clear,— When we lifted him up, he would fain have pursued, but grew dizzy instead. Break his sword and his spear! Let this last prayer be said By the bed We have made underneath the wet wind in the maple trees moaning so drear: "O Lord God, by the red Sullen end of the year That is here, We beseech Thee to guide us and strengthen our swords till his slayers be dead!" O COVERING grasses! O unchanging trees! Is it not good to feel the odorous wind Come down upon you with such harmonies Only the giant hills can ever find? O little leaves, are ye not glad to be? Is not the sunlight fair, the shadow kind, That falls at noontide over you and me? O gleam of birches lost among the firs, Let your high treble chime in silverly Across the half-imagined wind that stirs A muffled organ-music from the pines! Earth knows to-day that not one note of hers Is minor. For, behold, the loud sun shines Till the young maples are no longer gray, And stronger grows their faint, uncertain lines; Each violet takes a deeper blue to-day, And purpler swell the cones hung overhead, Until the sound of their far feet who stray About the wood, fades from me; and, instead, I hear a robin singing—not as one That calls unto his mate, uncomforted— But as one sings a welcome to the sun. A LITTLE while before the fall was done A day came when the frail year paused and said: "Behold! a little while and I am dead; Wilt thou not choose, of all the old dreams, one?" Then dwelt I in a garden, where the sun Shone always, and the roses all were red; Far off the great sea slept, and overhead Among the robins matins had begun. And I knew not at all it was a dream Only, and that the year was near its close; Garden and sunshine, robin-song and rose, The half-heard murmur and the distant gleam Of all the unvext sea, a little space Were as a mist above the Autumn's face. |
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