Substratum.

Hear you r o music in the creaks         Made by the sallow grasshopper,      Who in the hot weeds sharply breaks         The mellow dryness with his cheer?         Or did you by the hearthstones hear      The cricket's kind, shrill strain when frost         Worked mysteries of silver near      Upon the casement's panes, and lost     Without the gate-post seemed a sheeted ghost?      Or through the dank, dim Springtide's night         Green minstrels of the marshlands tune      Their hoarse lyres in the pale twilight,         Hailing the sickle of the moon         From flag-thronged pools that glassed her lune?      Or in the Summer, dry and loud,         The hard cicada whirr aboon      His long lay in a poplar's cloud,     When the thin heat rose wraith-like in a shroud?      The cloud that lids the naked moon,         And smites the myriad leaves with night      Of stormy lashes, livid strewn         With veins of branched and splintered light;         The fruitful glebe with blossoms white,      The thistle's purple plume; the tears         Pearling the matin buds' delight,      Contain a something, it appears,     'Neath their real selves - a poetry that cheers.      Nor scoff at those who on the wold         See fairies whirling in the shine      Of prodigal moons, whose lavish gold         Paves wood-ways, forests wild with vine,         When all the wilderness with wine      Of tipsy dew is dazed; nor say         Our God's restricted to confine      His wonders solely to the day,     That yields the abstract tangible to clay.      Ponder the entrance of the Morn         When from her rubric forehead far      Shines one clean star, and the dead tarn,         The wooded river's red as war:         Where arid splinters of the scar      Lock horns above a blue abyss,         How roses prank each icy bar,      While piled aloft the mountains press,     Fling dawn below from many a hoary tress.      The jutting crags, all stubborn-veined         With iron life, where eaglets scream      In dizzy flocks, and cleave the stained         Mist-rainbows of the mountain stream;         Thus you will drink the thickest cream      Of nature if you do not scan          The bald external; and must deem      A plan existent in a plan -     As life in thrifty trees or soul in man.