DOWN the river slowly drifting

  Float the rafts of river-men,

While the light is slowly shifting

  Backward o’er the hills again.

 

’Mid the silence rings their singing,

  Voicing low the old refrain,

But the chanson gay beginning

  Ends “Mironton, mirontaine”.

 

Now the myriad lights are glowing

  Whitely where the city sleeps,

While the plashing drip of rowing

  Upward from the river creeps.

 

Low the waters murmur falling,

  Moaning through the Chaudiere,

Like a whispered, ghostly calling,

  Voicing deep their wild despair.

 

Fade the distant voices singing,

  Faint recurs the low refrain,

Still the chanson gay beginning,

  Dies “Mironton, mirontaine”.

WE who are left must wait the years’ slow healing,

  Seeing the things they loved, the life they lost—

The clouds that out the east come, huge, concealing

  The angry sunset, burnished, tempest-tossed.

How will we bear earth’s beauty, visions, wonder,

  Knowing they loved them in the self-same way—

Th’ exulting lightning followed by deep thunder,

  Th’ exhilaration of each dawning day?

Banners of northern lights for them loom greener,

  Waving as wave’s the sea-weed’s streamered head;

Where bent the swaying wheat, the sun-burned gleaner

  Will find in their remembrance flowers of red.

Oh, life must be immortal for their sake:

Oh, earth will rest them gently till they wake.

WHEN peace has come, and I return from France,

  I know the places that I’ll long to see:

Those hunch-backed hills so full of old romance,

  Where first frail Beauty’s visions dawned for me,

And April comes, swift, dancing like a girl,

  With golden tresses flowing in the breeze,

And where swart, autumn leaves disport and whirl,

  In maudlin dance beneath the naked trees.

 

WHEN the snow has left the hollows

    And the birds are flying North,

  When the winds are warm with April and the rain,

Oh, it’s then the footsteps falter and the weary eyesight follows

  The ways that to the wilderness lead forth.

 

Then the heart longs for the river

  With its chanting choral song

    And the chain of inland waters without end.

Oh, it’s then the pulses quicken and the nerves are all aquiver

  To take the trail and trek among the strong.

 

And the fellowship of faring

  Is the lure that wills you on

    With the call to which you never answer no.

So it’s then you’ll take the highroad and the free road, never caring,

  And life will lead you out to meet the dawn.

 

HOW still the quiet fields this autumn day,

  The piled up sheaves no more retain their gold,

  And ploughmen drive their horses o’er the mould,

While up into the hills and far away

The white road winds to where the sun’s last ray

  Mantles the heavens in a scarlet fold

  Of glorious colour, of radiance untold,

And then the twilight turns the red to gray.

 

“Such a sleep, they sleep, the men I loved.”—Tennyson.

THEY are not here, the comrades of our childhood,

  Close friends of college days,

They have left us like creatures of the wild-wood

  For other ways.

 

And we must climb with comrades new the mountains,

  The highways loved of youth,

And seal in us the welling of the fountains

  Of sorrow, ruth.

 

O we will feel the beauty of the places

  That haunted so their hearts;

O we will miss the friendship of the faces

  The silence parts.

 

But ever midst the laughter or the sorrow

  We must remember how,

They also lived with hoping for the morrow

  As we do now.

 

 And often ’neath the star light of the vastness

  Often we will recall,

How they too loved the silence of the fastness

  Where shadows fall.

 

And in their hearts the wistful love of beauty

  In shy and silent life,

Was silenced when the summons came to duty

  And grief was rife.

 

To us their youth is wondrous as the eagle

  In ever heightening flight,

They will awake the visions of the regal

  In darkest night.

 

HOW well I know that in the months to be

  Pale Proserpine will blow the buds to fire,

  And frost-bound hills will don their new attire;

Along the lanes the poet’s eye will see

A dash of blue where swift the bluebirds flee,

  And all the world will rouse at Love’s desire,

  And Winter at her bidding will retire,

But all this beauty will be lost to me.

 

Sweet April and the red-lipped, dream-eyed May

  Will wander through the meadows with the breeze,

But how can Love and Beauty bear the day

  When death and sorrow reign across the seas?

Sad thoughts will still my heart to old delights,

And blind mine eyes to former beauteous sights.

IN France the fields are brown with new turned earth,

  The trees stand bare and gaunt before the breeze,

Which blows across the country mad with mirth

  With wailings through the silhouetted trees.

 

The long roads reach across the furrowed ground

  And silence holds the land within her spell;

The creaking carts of peasants homeward bound

  Jolt towards Vendôme’s ringing vesper bell.

 

I TOO have searched for Beauty in this life,

  For loveliness amongst the woes of men,

The spark of joy which shines from out the strife,

  The will-o’-wisp’s white dancing o’er the fen;

To find the spur which urges, goads the soul

  To toil through depths to greater heights above

Where Beauty is the mighty, final goal

  And roads to Beauty run through vales of love.

 

O MOON that shines to-night,

So softly whitely, bright,

Come to me over the hills of light

  Over the hills of dream.

Into the land of love’s delight,

Out of the everlasting night,

  Over the hills of dream.

 

I SAW you standing midst the golden-rod

  That filled the fields with swaying dew-lit ore,

  And marvellous was the message that you bore

Standing alone amid the flowers of God.

For Beauty dawned for me as at the nod

  Of old magician learned in ancient lore

  And ever after Beauty more and more

Kept calling from the boundless spaces broad.

 

And sometimes when the path of life loomed steep

  Or bitterness seemed doomed to fill the day

This memory came as turn the tides that creep

  Back to the solitude of shore and bay;

And sorrow fled as the renascent sweep

  Of recollection glorified the day.

THE drummer sounds the summons to our room,

  The light-encircled spiel-platz soon lies bare

And desolate, except where buildings loom,

  Limning their shadows on the vacant square.

A gramophone grinds out a raucous song,

  And boisterous laughs resound along the halls;

Now comes the muffling silence, slowly throng

  The multitude of stars where darkness falls.

 

Inside the room stentorian breathings sound,

  Or preparations made for nightly rest;

Without the windows silence sleeps profound;

  Now comes the moon above the far hill’s crest.

Asleep the buildings seem in pallid light;

Adream, we prisoners pass the peaceful night.

O MEN who question Immortality

  Behold the loveliness of earth and sky

And learn that life is not futility

  But promises the spirit will not die.

 

I know from my brave comrades gone before

  That life must be for more than earthly length,

And death is but the swiftly opened door

  Leading to higher aims and greater strength.

O WESTWARD to low lying hills, O westward o’er the sea,

  To where the roads are white with dust, the uplands hazed with heat,

To places where my heart would be, the winds are calling me,

  O westward where my sweetheart waits, O westward shall we meet.

 

The roads of other lands are long, and foreign lands are fair,

  The winds with blossoms scented are, and though the hills are high,

I’d sooner tread low lying hills whose summits purple wear

  All cloaked with mist at break of day enshrouded by the sky.

 

O some there are who love the sea, all studded white with sails,

  And others ’neath the tropic sun to live and die may choose;

But give to me the western hills when tired daylight fails

  And casts across the western skies innumerable hues.

 

WE walked one morning in the long ago

To see the ancient Indian’s camping-place

Where he had spent so many summer days

In quietness, companioned by the trees

And blue lake water lapping wooded shores,

And dreams of deeds and prowess in the past.

The path we took meandered forest aisles,

Long vistas vanishing in traceried green,

Winding across a fairy-trodden glade

Where wild, red roses bloomed for our delight

And stalwart grew a gnarled old apple tree.

We loitered through sunned meadows million-flowered,

To pick the golden-rod or watch a hawk

Wheeling across the sky with sleepy wing,

Seeing the wild hare feeding furtive-eyed

Vanish amid the fern-leaved undergrowth.

 

We found the Indian stretched upon the plank

Serving as bed and only resting-place,

 While o’er his head the overturned canoe

Fashioned the roof and shelter from the rain.

Wizened and gaunt he was and poorly clad,

With weather-beaten face whose dignity

Was deepened by the length of lonely years

And solitude in the blue Laurentian hills.

 

Well I remember how your joyousness

And eager, shy, expectant wonderment

Recalled to those dim eyes remote, dim days,

The glory, the sweet perishable gleam

That whiten with warm magic all the past;

And how your soft voice reassured his heart,

Emboldening him to speak of old exploits,

The times he lured the fish with lighted torch

And speared them in the shadow-haunted streams,

Or trailed the restless caribou far north

Amid a wilderness of mighty breadth

Where Manitou for immemorial years

Held sway upon the silent mountain tops.

And last he spoke of summer idleness,

When those long, langorous, indolent hours

Passed leisurely as some deep-laden barge

Floats seaward down a sluggish, oozing stream.

 We took our leave, followed the homeward path,

But often after came to hear the tales

He told with guttural voice, in monotone,

Until the summer winged her southward way

And autumn in tan mantle red inwrought,

Wrapped round the hills her vivid gorgeous folds.

To-day your letter tells me he is gone

To join the company of braves and chiefs

Who held the land before our forbears came.

And so I wrote these lines commemorative

Of that momentous morning long ago.

LYING in No Man’s Land, he sleeps,

  Sleeps as well as they who rest

In the gardens by the sea,

  In the grave-yards of the west.

 

Sleeping in No Man’s Land, he dreams,

  Dreams of those in other lands;

Friends he left with pensive lips,

  Those he left with waiting hands.

 

Dreaming beneath a foreign sky,

  Death was but the evening star,

Setting now to rise again

  Past the Paradisal bar.

 

I’m going back to Canada,

  To roam the roads of white,

Where those old hills so dear to me

  Rise up to reach the night.

 

I’ll see the little lonely lake

  Asleep amid the hills

Whose solitude will re-awake,

  The rapture absence stills.

 

And one there is who waits for me,

  Beyond the sunset’s flare;

O, one there is I’ll haste to see,

  Warm sunlight on her hair.

 

O she will come with wistful eyes

  Along the well worn path;

For us the future will arise

  A glorious aftermath.

 

So I’ll go back to Canada,

  If God thus wills it so,

As weary travellers return

  To lands of long ago.

HERE in the shadows of our cloistered walk,

  Where all our life is narrowed to a square,

We prisoners sit; we sleep or read or talk,

  Dreaming of halcyon summers spent elsewhere.

The towering trees strive upward to the sky

  In semblance of our spirits’ liberty,

Which lives on recollections ne’er to die,

  Although the earthly body be not free.

And sometimes through the vaulted, cloudless blue

  There dives with thundering engine, swift as light,

An albatross, all painted, yellow, new,

  Volplaning housetops, vanishing in flight.

Thus do we pass our close-sequestered life,

Hoping the hopes of freedom, following strife.

DESOLATE, dark and dreary

  The dawning Christmas morn,

Desolate, dark and dreary

  This day that Christ was born.

 

Quietly, slowly, softly,

  The snow sinks as a cloud,

Quietly, slowly, softly,

  The snow falls like a shroud.

 

Silently, surely, weary,

  The sentries pace their beat,

Silently, surely, weary,

  The lagging hours we meet.

 

Imprisoned, lonely, hoping,

  The future is our goal,

Imprisoned, lonely, hoping,

  Time takes of us her toll.

NOT theirs the ordinary dark display

  Of carriages, twined flowers and music’s moan,

But theirs the sadness of a sadder day

  Abandoned and unutterably alone.

 

Along the stone paved road they slowly walk

  In costumes nondescript and colorless;

The loveliness of earth appears to mock

  The anguish hid beneath their pensiveness.

 

They have no solitude nor silent place

  To lessen grief by calm assuaging thought.

But soon the night with sleep compelling grace

Will wrest the mind from worries war has brought.

I SAW warm sunlight glancing gold on leaves

Which gently swayed and tossed the light that weaves

The interlacing shadows on the ground;

Once more on uplands lone, wind swept, I found

The solitary pine tree standing bare,

The sentinel of stillness, earth and air.

 

I dreamed of summer evenings when the hush

Of twilight falls amid the odours lush

Of lilacs sweet, and ’top the highest tree

The vesper sparrow sings his melody

When evening draws too swiftly to its close;

And quiet calm and rapturous repose

Allayed unrest till dawn with streams of light

Dispelled the phantom dreams of fleeing night.

IMMORTAL bard of beauty, Thou, whose pen,

  Inscribed gold charactry of thought sublime,

  Revealing all the romance of old time

And melancholy gaze of moor and glen;

Thy quest for beauty urged thee ’mid the fen

  Of smirching dust and London’s sullen grime

  To raise for her an altar rich with rhyme,

Haunting the visions and the hearts of men.

 

Thy lines remind us of perpetual youth,

  Of pale nymphs dancing in a phantom light,

  Singing the song of warm, celestial night,

Or tell us of the loneliness of Ruth.

  The love of beauty has enriched thy name,

  While truth for guerdon gave the touch of fame.

THE world has changed her coverlet

  Of winds that blew so bitterly,

  Donning her April drapery

Of laughing sunlight, flower-inset.

 

And all the birds and beasts now let

  Their voices praise the panoply:

The world has changed her coverlet.

 

The river, fountain, rivulet

  Disport in jocund livery

  With drops of silver jewelry:

Earth’s creatures fairer garments get,

The world has changed her coverlet.

A SHIP that speeds with a crimson sail,

  Aslant on a restless sea,

And in my heart the longing

  That stirs unceasingly.

 

A wind that warms with a perfumed breath

  Adrift from the dreaming earth,

And for my grief no solace

  But melancholy’s dearth.

 

A hush that haunts like a loved one’s smile

  In dreams of departed years,

But in the silence sadness

  And unavailing tears.

 

The night that comes with a bat-like sweep,

  A moon with the harvest light,

But O, the endless yearning

  For one beyond the night.

WE all will pass the rising and the setting

  Of this our life’s short span

And with us go remembrance and forgetting

  The life of man.

 

They reach an end the parting and the meeting,

  Our hopes and fears, and death,

And all must greet completion and the fleeting

  Of life’s last breath.

THERE is a window in a house I know

Through which I watched the wind so softly blow

The dew-wet lilacs that they swayed as though

By spirit moved; to me, at break of day

There stole a haunting breath, a roundelay

Charming the lattice with the lure of May.

 

And one there was who loved the lilacs too,

And so I picked them wet with morning dew

And gave them for their beauty’s thrilling hue;

The lilacs now are dreams of long ago;

Yet still is seen their dew impassioned glow

Watched from a window in a house I know.

O COME once more, calm days of autumn, come,

To this our land where summer’s splendor goes

The way of all the winding, wayward years

And life is cool and tranquil, calmly dim.

Among the mountains, valleys, woods, O move,

Thou spirit white of everlasting sleep,

Casting the spell of silence, rest and peace

And folding wearied hearts unto thy breast.

O still the soul of earth with thy repose,

Burning the leaves of maple fiery red,

Tingeing the hills a rainbow afterglow,

And spreading wings o’ershadowing this our land,

O burst the bonds of earth’s eternal woe,

Leave us no vestige of the vaunted past,

When pomp and pageant filled the summer hours,

For we are tired of revel, carnival,

Wanting the languor, wistful loveliness

Which thou dost bring with passiveness benign.

 And we will heap with pine the huge stone hearth

Where all the long, dark, solemn autumn eves

The resinous logs will render warmth and dreams,

And love will haunt the ingle’s hushing light

O shed around us days with silence dim,

Thou spirit white of everlasting sleep.

FAST disappearing emblem of old days

  When man first trod the frontier wilderness

  Sowing the seed which later grew to dress

The axe-cleared land, with miles of sunlit maize.

 

Along haphazard windings, zig-zag ways,

  In April bluebirds flew all azure plumed,

  Beside the lowest logs the Blood-root bloomed

Unconscious of the brilliant noontide blaze.

 

But now the logs lie rotting in the grass

  Or feed the fires of chill October eves;

  Of former landscapes progress only leaves

A vestige which eventually will pass.

  Thus gradually the old-time glamour fades

  And fading, dies, as wind through forest glades.

HOW long ago it seems since last we met,

How long ago, but memory sees thee yet,

When sunlight was awakening the woods

And chestnut buds were burgeoning with hoods.

How beautiful the earth was on that day!

For with her wand, the arch enchantress May

Had touched the flowers long lulled in opiate sleep

And near the pines th’ arbutus ’gan to creep,

And spring with mystic minstrelsy had wrought

Her magic in the meadows; warm winds brought

The susurrus of sounds, foretelling years

Replete with songs and laughter, rife with tears;

O spring had found our hearts and planted deep

The restlessness the years of youth must reap.

Thus was the world and still I see thee stand

 With parted eager lips and every strand

Of dark brown hair that floated from the brim

Of thy broad hat and fluttered with the whim

Of playful, wastrel winds that passed, delayed,

Then whispered, homeward, westward through the glade.

And oft we strayed together in the sun,

Pulling the daisies’ petals, one by one,

Watching the river slowly stealing by,

Hearing the flicker’s rushing, strident cry,

Or when the mood would change there’d come to me

Commingling with the season’s melody,

Half murmured snatches of some ancient song,

Ringing through our laughter all the day live-long.

 

    “Love in the world of old

      Fashioned his house with pride

    Deep in the heart of a wood

      High on the lone hillside.

    Building the laughter and song,

      Forming the mirth and the fears,

    Giving the gifts of the heart

      Into the hands of the years.

 

     “Love in the world of old

      Fashioned his færy shrine,

    White for the hope of the years

      Tall as the towering pine;

    Weaving the shadowy dreams,

      Dowering the earth with desire,

    Lifting the soul of man

      Out of the depths of the mire.”

 

NOW war is done and kultur is laid low

  Among unutterable things, we pray

  And ask, O God, that Thou wilt lay

The seed which in the future years will grow

The flower of peace, supplanting flowers of woe,

  Until the world, long wrapped in weary grey,

  Donning her raiment of eternal May,

Will hear no more the flourished trumpet blow.