That scarcely shiver in the passing breeze.

‘Tis but a touch of winter ere his time,
   A presaging of sleep and icy death,
When skies are rich and fields are in their prime,
   And heaven and earth commingle in a breath:—

When hazy airs are stirred with gossamer wings,
And in shorn fields the shrill cicada sings.

So comes the slow revolving of the year,
   The glory of nature ripening to decay,
When in those paths by which, through loves austere,

   All men and beasts and blossoms find their way,
By steady easings of the Spirit’s dream,
From sunlight past the pallid starlight’s beam.

Nor should the spirit sorrow as it passes,
   Declining slowly by the heights it came;

We are but brothers to the birds and grasses,
   In our brief coming and our end the same:
And though we glory godlike in our day,
Perchance some kindred law their lives obey.

There are a thousand beauties gathered round:

Like-heirs of earth and her maturity.

They speak a silent speech that is their own,
   These wise and gentle teachers of the grass;
And when their breif and common days are flown,
   A certain beauty from the year doth pass:—

A beauty of whose light no eye can tell,
Save that it went; and my heart knew itwell.

I may not know each plant as some men know them,
   As children gather beasts and birds to tame;
But I went ‘mid them as the winds that blow them,

   From childhood’s hour, and loved without a name.
There is more beauty in a field of weeds
Than in all blooms the hothouse garden breeds.

For they are nature’s children; in their faces
   I see the sweet obedience to the sky