The Garden of Dreams. Cawein Madison Julius

      There, from its entrance, lost in matted vines, —

      Where in the valley foams a water-fall, —

      Is glimpsed a ruined mill's remaining wall;

      Here, by the road, the oxeye daisy mines

      Hot brass and bronze; the trumpet-trailer shines

      Red as the plumage of the cardinal.

      Faint from the forest comes the rain-crow's call

      Where dusty Summer dreams among the pines.

      This is the spot where Spring writes wildflower verses

      In primrose pink, while, drowsing o'er his reins,

      The ploughman, all unnoticing, plods along:

      And where the Autumn opens weedy purses

      Of sleepy silver, while the corn-heaped wains

      Rumble the bridge like some deep throat of song.

      Ten-hundred deep the drifted daisies break

      Here at the hill's foot; on its top, the wheat

      Hangs meagre-bearded; and, in vague retreat,

      The wisp-like blooms of the moth-mulleins shake.

      And where the wild-pink drops a crimson flake,

      And morning-glories, like young lips, make sweet

      The shaded hush, low in the honeyed heat,

      The wild-bees hum; as if afraid to wake

      One sleeping there; with no white stone to tell

      The story of existence; but the stem

      Of one wild-rose, towering o'er brier and weed,

      Where all the day the wild-birds requiem;

      Within whose shade the timid violets spell

      An epitaph, only the stars can read.

      Dark in the west the sunset's somber wrack

      Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,

      Along whose battlements the battle lit

      Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,

      A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,

      Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,

      Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit

      With conflagration glaring at each crack.

      Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes

      Our dreams as real as our waking seems

      With recollections time can not destroy,

      So in the mind of Nature now awakes

      Haply some wilder memory, and she dreams

      The stormy story of the fall of Troy.

      How does the Autumn in her mind conclude

      The tragic masque her frosty pencil writes,

      Broad on the pages of the days and nights,

      In burning lines of orchard, wold, and wood?

      What lonelier forms – that at the year's door stood

      At spectral wait – with wildly wasted lights

      Shall enter? and with melancholy rites

      Inaugurate their sadder sisterhood? —

      Sorrow, who lifts a signal hand, and slow

      The green leaf fevers, falling ere it dies;

      Regret, whose pale lips summon, and gaunt Woe

      Wakes the wild-wind harps with sonorous sighs;

      And Sleep, who sits with poppied eyes and sees

      The earth and sky grow dream-accessories.

      The flute, whence Autumn's misty finger-tips

      Drew music – ripening the pinched kernels in

      The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,

      Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips, —

      Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips

      And surly songs whistle around his chin:

      Now the wild days and wilder nights begin

      When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips.

      Thy songs, O Autumn, are not lost so soon!

      Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,

      Which, unto Winter's masculine airs, doth give

      Thy own creative qualities of tune,

      By which we see each bough bend white with fruit,

      Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative.

      The frail eidolons of all blossoms Spring,

      Year after year, about the forest tossed,

      The magic touch of the enchanter, Frost,

      Back from the Heaven of the Flow'rs doth bring;

      Each branch and bush in silence visiting

      With phantom beauty of its blooms long lost:

      Each dead weed bends, white-haunted of its ghost,

      Each dead flower stands ghostly with blossoming.

      This is the wonder-legend Nature tells

      To the gray moon and mist a winter's night;

      The fairy-tale, which her weird fancy 'spells

      With all the glamour of her soul's delight:

      Before the summoning sorcery of her eyes

      Making her spirit's dream materialize.

      Deep in the dell I watched her as she rose,

      A face of icy fire, o'er the hills;

      With snow-sad eyes to freeze the forest rills,

      And snow-sad feet to bleach the meadow snows:

      Pale as some young witch who, a-listening, goes

      To her first meeting with the Fiend; whose fears

      Fix demon eyes behind each bush she nears;

      Stops, yet must on, fearful of following foes.

      And so I chased her, startled in the wood,

      Like a discovered Oread, who flies

      The Faun who found her sleeping, each nude limb

      Glittering betrayal through the solitude;

      Till in