He wakes to find a wrestling giant
Trunk to trunk and limb to limb,
And on his rooted force reliant,

He laughs and grasps the broadened giant,
And twist and roll the Anakim;

And multitudes acclaiming to the cloud,
Cry which is breaking, which is bowed.

Away, for the cymbals clash aloft

In the circles of pine, on the moss-floor soft.
The nymphs of the woodland are gathering

there,

They huddle the leaves, and trample, and toss; They swing in the branches, they roll in the

moss,

They blow the seed on the air.
Back to back they stand and blow
The winged seed on the cradling air,

A fountain of leaves over bosom and back.
The pipe of the Faun comes on their track,
And the weltering alleys overflow

With musical shrieks and wind-wedded hair.
The riotous companies melt to a pair.
Bless them, mother of kindness!

A star has nodded through
The depths of the flying blue.
Time only to plant the light
Of a memory in the blindness.
But time to show me the sight

Of my life thro' the curtain of night;
Shining a moment, and mixed

With the onward-hurrying stream,

Whose pressure is darkness to me;

Behind the curtain, fixed,

Beams with endless beam

That star on the changing sea.

Great Mother Nature! teach me, like thee,
To kiss the season and shun regrets.
And am I more than the mother who bore,
Mock me not with thy harmony!

Teach me to blot regrets,
Great Mother! me inspire
With faith that forward sets
But feeds the living fire.
Faith that never frets
For vagueness in the form.
In life, O keep me warm!

For what is human grief?
And what do men desire?
Teach me to feel myself the tree,
And not the withered leaf.
Fixed am I and await the dark to-be!

And O, green bounteous Earth!
Bacchante Mother! stern to those
Who live not in thy heart of mirth;
Death shall I shrink from, loving thee?
Into the breast that gives the rose,
Shall I with shuddering fall?

Earth, the mother of all,
Moves on her steadfast way,
Gathering, flinging, sowing.
Mortals, we live in her day,
She in her children is growing.

She can lead us, only she,

Unto God's footstool, whither she reaches:

Loved, enjoyed, her gifts must be,

Reverenced the truths she teaches,

Ere a man may hope that he

Ever can attain the glee
Of things without a destiny!

She knows not loss:
She feels but her need,
Who the winged seed
With the leaf doth toss.

And may not men to this attain?

That the joy of motion, the rapture of being, Shall throw strong light when our season is fleeing,

Nor quicken aged blood in vain,

At the gates of the vault, on the verge of the

plain?

Life thoroughly lived is a fact in the brain,
While eyes are left for seeing.

Behold, in yon stripped Autumn, shivering grey,
Earth knows no desolation.

She smells regeneration

In the moist breath of decay.

Prophetic of the coming joy and strife,

Like the wild western war-chief sinking
Calm to the end he eyes unblinking,

Her voice is jubilant in ebbing life.
He for his happy hunting-fields,

Forgets the droning chant, and yields
His numbered breaths to exultation
In the proud anticipation:

Shouting the glories of his nation,
Shouting the grandeur of his race,
Shouting his own great deeds of daring:
And when at last death grasps his face,
And stiffened on the ground in peace
He lies with all his painted terrors glaring;
Hushed are the tribe to hear a threading cry

Not from the dead man;
Not from the standers-by:
The spirit of the red man

Is welcomed by his fathers up on high.

George Meredith

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

O

I

WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves

dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter flee

ing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odors plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are

shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height
The locks of the approaching storm.

Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!

Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers