ODE
TO SILENCE
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THINE
are the inaudible harmonies that keep
The brooding breathings
of the night’s glad lute,
When in those pauses ‘twixt her sleep and
sleep
All holy tunes be mute.
All beauteous seasons thou dost guard and bless,
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The
tremulous dawn, hushed noon, and cooling night,
Earth, air, and ocean, thy dim palaces,
Filled with divine delight.
The fathomless wells of heaven’s deeps
are thine;
Thou watchest over night’s
infinitudes;
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The
starry vast, within whose chant divine
No dissonant chord intrudes.
Thine are those oceans dim, untenanted,
The unprescient homes
of pregnancies to be,
Filling the lonley realms of mighty dread
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| With
formless majesty.
Thou keepest the dewy caverns of the night
About majestic risings
of the moon,
When over the breathing woods her phosphor light
Rises to silvern noon.
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Thou lovest those lonely avenues of light
In the sun-kindled woods
at early morn,
Upon the rosy rim of fading night
And the cloudy meadows shorn;
Filling the joyous airs with summer fraught,
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And
morning’s slopes with dewy odors bland;
Here with glad Fancy and slow-wingèd Thought
Thou wanderest hand in hand.
Thou holdest those intervals of peace that dwell
About the caverned shores
of ocean furled,
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When
the long midnight hush or noonday swell
Slumbers about the world.
But dearest of all thou lovest that pensive hour,
That holy hour about the
fringe of eve,
When sunset dreams in lonely woods have power
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| Imaginings
to weave;—
When all the sunset world seems ages old
In sad romance and achings
of dead wrong,
And all the beauty of life is poignant gold
In the hermit thrush’s
song.
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Then down the long, dim memories of old woods
Facing for ever the far-westering
sun,
I’d dream for aye through hallowed solitudes
Where magic echoes run;—
Seeking the majesty of peace wherein thou hidest,
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Those
golden rivers of being without alloy;
Knowing the infinite of dream is where thou bidest,
Thou and that calm joy.
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