We can never feel the freshness, never find again the mood

Left among fair-featured places, brightened of our brotherhood.

This and this we have to think of when the night is over all,

When the woods begin to perish, and the rains begin to fall.

SEPTEMBER IN AUSTRALIA

GRAY Winter hath gone, like a wearisome guest,

And, behold, for repayment, September comes in with the wind of the West

And the Spring in her raiment !

The stories of Youth, of the burden of Time,

And the death of Devotion,

Come back with the wind, and are themes of the rhyme

In the waves of the ocean.

We, having a secret to others unknown,
In the cool mountain-mosses,
May whisper together, September, alone
Of our loves and our losses.

One word for her beauty, and one for the place

She gave to the hours;

And then we may kiss her, and suffer her face

To sleep with the flowers.

With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,

And gleams like a dream in his face-
Like a marvellous dream in his face?

THE VOICE IN THE WILD OAK

TWELVE years ago, when I could face High heaven's dome with different eyes, In days full-flowered with hours of grace, And nights not sad with sighs,

I wrote a song in which I strove

To shadow forth thy strain of woe, Dark widowed sister of the grove – Twelve wasted years ago.

But youth was then too young to find
Those high authentic syllables
Whose voice is like the wintering wind
By sunless mountain fells ;
Nor had I sinned and suffered then
To that superlative degree
That I would rather seek, than men,
Wild fellowship with thee.

But he who hears this autumn day

Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,
Is one whose hair was shot with gray
By grief instead of time.

He has no need, like many a bard,
To sing imaginary pain,
Because he bears, and finds it hard,
The punishment of Cain.

No more he sees the affluence
Which makes the heart of Nature glad ;
For he has lost the fine first sense

Of beauty that he had.

The old delight God's happy breeze
Was wont to give, to grief has grown ;
And therefore, Niobe of trees,

His song is like thine own.

But I, who am that perished soul,
Have wasted so these powers of mine,
That I can never write that whole,

Pure, perfect speech of thine.
Some lord of words august, supreme,
The grave, grand melody demands;
The dark translation of thy theme
I leave to other hands.

Yet here, where plovers nightly call Across dim melancholy leas

Then times there are when all the words
Are like the sentences of one
Shut in by fate from wind and birds
And light of stars and sun!
No dazzling dryad, but a dark

Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be Imprisoned, cramped in bands of bark, For all eternity.

Yea, like the speech of one aghast

At Immortality in chains,
What time the lordly storm rides past
With flames and arrowy rains:
Some wan Tithonus of the wood,
White with immeasurable years
An awful ghost, in solitude

With moaning moors and meres !

And when high thunder smites the hill
And hunts the wild dog to his den,
Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill
Ånd shriek from glen to glen,
As if a frightful memory whipped

But, ah! conceptions fade away,

And still the life that lives in thee,
The soul of thy majestic lay,
Remains a mystery!

And he must speak the speech divine,
The language of the high-throned lords,
Who'd give that grand old theme of thine
Its sense in faultless words.

By hollow lands and sea-tracts harsh,
With ruin of the fourfold gale,
Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh,
Still wail thy lonely wail;

And, year by year, one step will break
The sleep of far hill-folded streams,
And seek, if only for thy sake,

Thy home of many dreams.

More than ever you could gather-
More than ever you could glean
From our tale.

We have seen, and heard, and laughed,
As we tossed the shattered craft,
While those on board, aghast,
Every moment thought their last,
In the gale.

We tossed them like a plaything,
And rent their riven sail;
And we laughed our loud Ha! ha!
With the demons of the gale
In their ears.

We have laughed, and heard, and seen,
In the lightning's lurid sheen,

And the growling thunder's blast;
And we drowned them all at last

For their fears.

There were mothers there on board

With their little ones in arms; There were maidens there on board More lovely in their charms Than the day;

And again we heard, and laughed As we dashed across the craft;

While our master shrieked and roared,
As we swept them overboard,
And away.

And they battled all in vain,
With their puny human strength.
In our grasp they were as nothing;
Down, down, they sank at length
In the sea;
And still again we screamed,
As the lurid flashes gleamed,
And o'er their heads we swept,
And for joy we danced and leapt
In our glee.

This, this, now is the tale
We have to tell to-day,
And now to you we've sung it
In our merry, mocking way.
Do you hear?

How our havoc we have wrought,
And to destruction brought
The treasures of the Earth,
Held by man in price, and worth,
Very dear?

Oh! ye cruel waves up-dashing,
Why rejoice you so to-day?
As shoreward ye come crashing
From your cruel, cruel play;
Why fling ye up your spray
On the shore?

The sand your salt spume splashing,
As ye frolic in your glee;
As the iron rocks ye 're lashing,
Ye scourges of the sea, -
Will ye never then be glutted
Any more?