The Garden of Dreams. Cawein Madison Julius

      When in dry hollows, hilled with hay,

      The vesper-sparrow sings afar;

      And, golden gray, dusk dies away

      Beneath the amber evening-star:

      There, where a warm and shadowy arm

      The woodland lays around the farm,

      To meet you where we kissed, dear heart,

      To kiss you at the tryst, dear heart,

      To kiss you at the tryst!

      When clover fields smell cool with dew,

      And crickets cry, and roads are still;

      And faint and few the fire-flies strew

      The dark where calls the whippoorwill;

      There, in the lane, where sweet again

      The petals of the wild-rose rain,

      To stroll with head to head, dear heart,

      And say the words oft said, dear heart,

      And say the words oft said!

      I hear the hoofs of horses

      Galloping over the hill,

      Galloping on and galloping on,

      When all the night is shrill

      With wind and rain that beats the pane —

      And my soul with awe is still.

      For every dripping window

      Their headlong rush makes bound,

      Galloping up, and galloping by,

      Then back again and around,

      Till the gusty roofs ring with their hoofs,

      And the draughty cellars sound.

      And then I hear black horsemen

      Hallooing in the night;

      Hallooing and hallooing,

      They ride o'er vale and height,

      And the branches snap and the shutters clap

      With the fury of their flight.

      Then at each door a horseman, —

      With burly bearded lip

      Hallooing through the keyhole, —

      Pauses with cloak a-drip;

      And the door-knob shakes and the panel quakes

      'Neath the anger of his whip.

      All night I hear their gallop,

      And their wild halloo's alarm;

      The tree-tops sound and vanes go round

      In forest and on farm;

      But never a hair of a thing is there —

      Only the wind and storm.

      "I belt the morn with ribboned mist;

      With baldricked blue I gird the noon,

      And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed,

      White-buckled with the hunter's moon.

      "These follow me," the season says:

      "Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs

      Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways,

      With gipsy gold that weighs their backs."

      A daybreak horn the Autumn blows,

      As with a sun-tanned band he parts

      Wet boughs whereon the berry glows;

      And at his feet the red-fox starts.

      The leafy leash that holds his hounds

      Is loosed; and all the noonday hush

      Is startled; and the hillside sounds

      Behind the fox's bounding brush.

      When red dusk makes the western sky

      A fire-lit window through the firs,

      He stoops to see the red-fox die

      Among the chestnut's broken burs.

      Then fanfaree and fanfaree,

      Down vistas of the afterglow

      His bugle rings from tree to tree,

      While all the world grows hushed below.

      Like some black host the shadows fall,

      And darkness camps among the trees;

      Each wildwood road, a Goblin Hall,

      Grows populous with mysteries.

      Night comes with brows of ragged storm,

      And limbs of writhen cloud and mist;

      The rain-wind hangs upon her arm

      Like some wild girl that will be kissed.

      By her gaunt hand the leaves are shed

      Like nightmares an enchantress herds;

      And, like a witch who calls the dead,

      The hill-stream whirls with foaming words.

      Then all is sudden silence and

      Dark fear – like his who can not see,

      Yet hears, aye in a haunted land,

      Death rattling on a gallow's tree.

      The days approach again; the days,

      Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag;

      When in the haze by puddled ways

      Each gnarled thorn seems a crookéd hag.

      When rotting orchards reek with rain;

      And woodlands crumble, leaf and log;

      And in the drizzling yard again

      The gourd is tagged with points of fog.

      Oh, let me seat my soul among

      Your melancholy moods! and touch

      Your thoughts' sweet sorrow without tongue,

      Whose silence says too much, too much!

      Long hosts of sunlight, and the bright wind blows

      A tourney trumpet on the listed hill:

      Past is the splendor of the royal rose

      And duchess daffodil.

      Crowned queen of beauty, in the garden's space,

      Strong daughter of a bitter race and bold,

      A ragged beggar with a lovely face,

      Reigns the sad marigold.

      And I have sought June's butterfly for days,

      To find it – like a coreopsis bloom —

      Amber and seal, rain-murdered 'neath the blaze

      Of this sunflower's plume.

      Here basks the bee; and there, sky-voyaging wings

      Dare God's blue gulfs of heaven; the last song,

      The red-bird flings me as adieu, still rings

      Upon