dragged me with its arms of lead.

Garden and flow'rs were either feared or false;
The very light of day was a distress;
And my poor hands already were too weak
To hold our trembling, captive, happiness.

My desires became but evil plants
That scourged like thistles in a windy place;
I felt my heart both frozen and afire,
Then arid, and rebellious unto grace.

But, nowhere searching save in simple love,
The most consoling word of all you spoke;
And at the glowing fire of your word
I warmed myself until the daylight broke.

I was not in your eyes, as in my own,
A man belittled by disease and grief;
You plucked me flowers from the window-ledge,
And I believed in health with your belief.

You brought to me within your garments' folds
The eager air, the wind of field and wood,
Scents of the eve and odours of the dawn,
And sunlight in your kisses fresh and good.




XVI


All that lives about us here,
Beneath a radiance soft and clear,
Soft grasses, tender branches, hollyhocks,
The shade that soothes them, the wind that mocks,
The singing birds that one by one
Join the brilliant swarm,
Like jewel-clusters, warm
With sun;
All that lives within the garden wall,
Love us ingenuously;
And we,
We love them all.

Dear to us the lilies that grow high;
The reaching sunflowers clearer than the sky
—Circles that bright lambent tongues enroll—
Burn, with their glowing fervency, our soul.

The simple flowers, phlox and lilac tall,
Down by the wall,
Are yearning to be near us too,
And the involuntary grass,
On the lawn when we pass,
Opens its moistened eyes that are the dew.

We live with the flowers and the grass,
Simple, pure and ardent still,
Lost in our love,
Like single sheaves within the infinite wheat,
And proudly let imperial summer pass
And from above
Sweep and pierce with clarity
Body, heart and will.




XVII


With all my heart and brain, my feeling and my seeing,
And with the flaming torch of all my being
That reaches toward your goodness and your love,
Forever unassuaged,
I love and bring you thanks and endless praise
For having come in all simplicity
Along devoted ways,
To take, with gracious hands, my destiny.

And since you leaned above,
I know—oh what a love!
Candid and clear as is the dew
Fallen upon my tranquil soul from you.

I am yours as by their nerves of flame
Fire and fuel merge;.
All my flesh and all my soul
Strive to you with undesisting urge;
Nor do I cease from long remembering
The fervency and beauty of our years,
Till suddenly I feel my eyes are filled
Deliciously, with unoblivious tears.

I come to you happy and resolved
With proud desire to be unto your soul
He who shall be the surest of its joys.
Tenderness folds us in an aureole;
Echoes, within me, at your call assemble;
The hour is holy and with rapture fraught,
And just to touch your brow my fingers tremble,
As though they brushed the pinions of your thought.




XVIII


Oh days of fresh and quiet healthfulness
When life is filled with beauty without end,
And inspiration comes familiarly,
A cherished friend.

He comes from lands all sweet and glimmering,
And with his words, more fair than dew, has brought,
Wherewith to set, a gem all luminous,
A sentiment, a thought.

He seizes on our being like a storm,
Rears up our spirit to new heights untrod,
Pours down the fire from beating stars, and brings
The gift of being God.

All fevered transports and profoundest fears
To his own tragic will are ever whirled,
That the pulse of beauty be made young
In the veins of the world.

I am at his mercy, am his ardent prey!

So, when from weary work I take my way,
Toward the deep repose which is your love,
With all my mind's high leaping fire sublime,
It seems—oh, for an instant's time—
That I may offer you, oh love,
As though of my own pulses it were part,
Of the great universe itself, the beating heart.




XIX


I have left the groves of sleep,
Sad a little to leave you
Hid beneath their branchy roof
From morning sun and dew.

Gleam now phlox and hollyhock;
I look on joyous garden site,
And know that soon the crystal bells
Will tinkle in the light.

Then suddenly I take my way to you,
With such a tenderness and love that sweep
Into my midmost being
That it seems my thought has travelled through—
To bring you joy of reawakening—
All the leafy umbrage of your sleep.

And when I come to you within the house,
That shade and silence still possess, hear
My ardent kisses, fresh
And clear,
Sing you a morning song through meadows of the flesh.




XX


Alas! when the poison of disease
Ran, with my slow and torpid blood,
More sluggish and more torpid day by day,
Ran in my veins a leaden flood;
And my poor eyes
Saw my hands so thin and white,
Morosely watched the dreaded course
Of the hated blight;
When I had not even force
Upon your heart my burning mouth to press
There to kiss our happiness;
When the days, monotonous and sad,
Gnawed my consciousness with spite,
I never could, myself, have found the will
To rise with stoic might,
If you had not poured into my veins
The secret heroism that you have,
Daily, every hour of every week,
With hands so patient, so serene and brave.




XXI


Within the garden there is healthfulness.

Lavishly it gives it us
In light that cleaves
To every movement of its thousand hands
Of palms and leaves.

And the good shade where it accepts,
After long journeyings,
Our steps,
Pours on the weary limb
A force of life and sweetness like
Its mosses dim.

When the lake is playing with the wind and sun,
It seems a crimson heart
Within, all ardent, has begun
To throb with the moving wave;
The gladiolus and the fervent rose,
Which