No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, TO AN ALASKAN GLACIER By Charles Keeler UT of the cloud-world sweeps thy awful form, Vast frozen river, fostered by the storm Up on the drear peak's snowencumbered crest, Thy sides deep grinding in the As down its slopes thou ploughest to the sea Wherein to round thy task of wonderment! ; The granite ground to sand beneath thy weight, Great bergs crash thunderously beneath the tide, And, slow emerging, o'er the waters ride Like boats of pearl slow floating to their doom, I walked erstwhile upon thy frozen waves, Or, when the storms wail round thy peaks and spires, Playing weird notes upon thy ice-wrought lyres Tumble and crash amidst the seething main. SUMMER DROUGHT HEN winter came the land was lean and sere: There fell no snow, and oft from wild and field In famished tameness came the drooping deer, And licked the waste about the troughs congealed. And though at spring we ploughed and proffered seed, It lay ungermed, a pillage for the birds: And unto one low dam, in urgent need, We daily drove the suppliant, lowing herds. But now the fields to barren waste have run, The dam a pool of oozing greenery lies, Where knots of gnats hang reeling in the sun Till early dusk, when tilt the dragon-flies. All night the craw-fish deepens out her wells, As shows the clay that freshly curbs them round; And many a random upheaved tunnel tells Where ran the mole across the fallow ground. But ah! the stone-dumb dullness of the dawn, When e'en the cocks too listless are to crow, And lies the world as from all life withdrawn, Unheeding and outworn and swooning low! There is no dew on any greenness shed, The hard-baked earth is cracked across the walks ; The very burrs in stunted clumps are dead And mullein leaves drop withered from the stalks. Yet, ere the noon, as brass the heaven turns, On either side the shoe-deep dusted lane No flock upon the naked pasture feeds, The sheep with prone heads huddle near the fence; A gust runs crackling through the brittle weeds, On outspread wings a hawk, far poised on high, Quick swooping screams, and then is heard no more: The strident shrilling of a locust nigh Breaks forth, and dies in silence as before. No transient cloud o'erskims with flakes of shade The landscape hazed in dizzy gleams of heat; A dove's wing glances like a parried blade, And western walls the beams in torrents beat. So burning low, and lower still the sun, T last the toil encumbered days are over, And airs of noon are mellow as the morn; The blooms are brown upon the seeding clover, And brown the silks that plume the ripening corn. All sounds are hushed of reaping and of mowing; And mute the farms along the purple valley, The full barns muffled to the beams with sheaves; You hear no more the noisy rout and rally Amongst the tenant-masons of the eaves. A single quail, upstarting from the stubble, |