FIRES IN ILLINOIS.
How bright this weird autumnal eve-
While the wild twilight clings around,
Clothing the grasses everywhere,
With scarce a dream of sound!
The high horizon's northern line,
With many a silent-leaping spire,
Seems a dark shore-a sea of flame-
Quick, crawling waves of fire!
I stand in dusky solitude,
October breathing low and chill, And watch the far-off blaze that leaps At the wind's wayward will.
These boundless fields, behold, once more, Sea-like in vanished summers stir;
From vanished autumns comes the FireA lone, bright harvester !
I see wide terror lit before
Wild steeds, fierce herds of bison here, And, blown before the flying flame,
The flying-footed deer!
Long trains (with shaken bells, that moved
Along red twilights sinking slow)
Whose wheels grew weary on their way,
Far westward, long ago;
Lone waggons bivouacked in the blaze
That long ago streamed wildly past;
Faces from that bright solitude
In the hot gleam aghast!
A glare of faces like a dream,
No history after or before,
Inside the horizon with the flames,
The flames-nobody more!
That vision vanishes in me,
Sudden and swift and fierce and bright; Another gentler vision fills
The solitude, to-night:
The horizon lightens everywhere,"
The sunshine rocks on windy maize ;
Hark, everywhere are busy men,
And children at their plays!
Far church-spires twinkle at the sun,
From villages of quiet born,
And, far and near, and everywhere,
Homes stand amid the corn.
No longer driven by wind, the Fire
Makes all the vast horizon glow,
But, numberless as the stars above,
The windows shine below!
ABOVE the sunken sun the clouds are fired
With a dark splendour: the enchanted hour
Works momentary miracles in the sky.
Weird shadows take from fancy what they lack
For semblance; and I see a boundless plain,
A mist of sun and sheaves in boundless air,
Gigantic shapes of reapers moving slow
In some new harvest. So I can but dream
Of my great Land, that takes its morning star
Out of the dusky evening of the East,
My Land, that lifted into vision gleams
Misty and vast, a boundless plain afar
(Like yonder fading fantasy of cloud)
With shadowy reapers moving, vague and slow,
In some wide harvest of the days to be—
A mist of sun and sheaves in boundless air!
A FABLE OF TWO LIVES.
THE Rose aloft in sunny air,
Beloved alike by bird and bee,
Takes for the dark Root little care,
That toils below it ceaselessly.
I put my question to the flower:
"Pride of the Summer, garden-queen,
Why livest thou thy little hour? "
And the Rose answered, "I am seen."
I put my question to the Root:
"I mine the earth content," it said,
"A hidden miner underfoot;
I know a Rose is overhead."
THE BLACKBERRY FARM.
NATURE gives with freest hands
Richest gifts to poorest lands.
When the lord has sown his last,
And his field's to desert passed,
She begins to claim her own,
And instead of harvests flown,
Sunburnt sheaves and golden ears-
Sends her hardier pioneers.
Barbarous brambles, outlawed seeds,
The first families of weeds
Fearing neither sun nor wind,
With the flowers of their kind
(Outcasts of the garden-bound),
Colonize the expended ground,
Using (none her right gainsay)
Confiscations of decay.
Thus she clothes the barren place,
Old disgrace, with newer grace.
Title-deeds, which cover lands
Ruled and reaped by buried hands,
She-disowning owners old,
Scorning their "to have and hold"-
Takes herself; the mouldering fence
Hides with her munificence;
O'er the crumbled gatepost twines
Her proprietary vines;
On the doorstep of the house
Writes in moss 66
And, that beast and bird may see,
"This is public property;"
To the bramble makes the sun
Bearer of profusion.
Blossom-odours breathe in June
Promise of her later boon,
And in August's brazen heat
Grows the prophecy complete-
Lo, her largess glistens bright,
Blackness diamonded with light!
Then, behold, she welcomes all
To her annual festival.
"Mine the fruit, but yours as well,"
Speaks the Mother Miracle.
"Rich and poor are welcome; come, Make to-day millennium
In my garden of the sun :
Black and white to me are one.
This my freehold use, content—
Here no landlord rides for rent ;
I proclaim my jubilee,
In my Black Republic, free.
Come," she beckons; "Enter, through
Gates of gossamer, doors of dew
(Lit with Summer's tropic fire),
My Liberia of the briar."
I STOOD at evening in the crimson air :
The trees shook off their dusky twilight glow;
The wind took up old burdens of despair,
And moaned like Atlas with his world of woe.
Like the great circle of a bronzèd ring,
That clasped the vision of the vanished day, I saw the vague horizon vanishing
Around me into darkness, far away.
Then, while the night came fast with cloudy roar, Lo, all about me, rays of hearths unknown Sprang from the gloom with light unseen before, And made a warm horizon of their own.
I sighed: "The wanderer in the desert sees Strange ghosts of summer lands arising, sweet With restless waters, green with gracious trees Whose shadows beckon welcome to his feet.
"For erst, where now the desert far away
Stretches a wilderness of hopeless sand,
Clasping fair fields and sunburnt harvests, lay
The heavenly girdles of a fruitful land."
I thought of a sweet mirage now no more:
Warm windows radiant with a dancing flame-
Dear voices heard within a happy door-
A face that to the darkness, lighted, came.
No hearth of mine was waiting, near or far;
No threshold for my coming footstep yearned
To touch its slumber; no warm window-star,
The tender Venus, to my longing burned.
The darkened windows slowly lost their fire,
But shimmered with the ghostly ember-light:
A wanderer, with old embers of desire,
The lost horizon held me in the night.
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