A Character.

He lived beyond us and we stood     As pygmies to his every mood,     Mere pupils at his beck and nod,     That spoke the influence of a god.     And oft we wondered, when his thought     Made our humanity seem naught,     If he, like Uther's mystic son,     Were not a birth for Avalon.     When wand'ring 'neath the sighing trees,     His soul waxed genial with the breeze,     That, voiceful, from the piney glades     Companioned seemed of Oreads;     A Dryad life lived in each oak,     And with its many leaf-tongues spoke,     Glorying the deity whose power     Gave it its life in sun and shower.     By every violet-hallowed brook,     Where every bramble-matted nook     Rippled and laughed with water-sounds,     He walked as one on sainted grounds,     Fearing intrusion on the spell     That kept some fountain-spirit's well,     Or woodland genius sitting where     Brown racy berries kissed his hair.     And when the wind far o'er the hill     Had fall'n and left the wildwood still     As moonlight jets on quiet moss, -     Beneath the pied boughs arched across     Long limpid vistas, brimmed with ripe     Green-swimming sunbeams, heard the pipe     Of some hid follower of Pan     And worshiper, half brute half man;     Who, hairy-haunched, a savage rhyme     Puffed in his reed to rudest time;     With swollen jowl and rolling eye     Danced boisterous where the silver sky     Smiled in the forest's broken roof;     The strident branch beneath his hoof     Snapped on the sod which, interfused     Between black roots, was crushed and bruised.     And often when he wandered through     Old forests at the fall of dew, -     A lone Endymion who sought     A higher beauty yet uncaught, -     Some night, we thought, most surely he     Were favored of her deity,     And in the holy solitude     Her sudden presence, long pursued,     Unto his eyes would be confessed;     The awful moonlight of her breast     Come high with majesty and hold     His heart's blood till his heart were cold,     Unpulsed, unsinewed, all undone,     And snatch his soul to Avalon.