The High Oaks

Fourscore years and seven     Light and dew from heaven     Have fallen with dawn on these glad woods each day     Since here was born, even here,     A birth more bright and dear     Than ever a younger year     Hath seen or shall till all these pass away,     Even all the imperious pride of these,     The woodland ways majestic now with towers of trees.     Love itself hath nought     Touched of tenderest thought     With holiest hallowing of memorial grace     For memory, blind with bliss,     To love, to clasp, to kiss,     So sweetly strange as this,     The sense that here the sun first hailed her face,     A babe at Her glad mother's breast,     And here again beholds it more beloved and blest.     Love's own heart, a living     Spring of strong thanksgiving,     Can bid no strength of welling song find way     When all the soul would seek     One word for joy to speak,     And even its strength makes weak     The too strong yearning of the soul to say     What may not be conceived or said     While darkness makes division of the quick and dead.     Haply, where the sun     Wanes, and death is none,     The word known here of silence only, held     Too dear for speech to wrong,     May leap in living song     Forth, and the speech be strong     As here the silence whence it yearned and welled     From hearts whose utterance love sealed fast     Till death perchance might give it grace to live at last.     Here we have our earth     Yet, with all the mirth     Of all the summers since the world began,     All strengths of rest and strife     And love-lit love of life     Where death has birth to wife,     And where the sun speaks, and is heard of man:     Yea, half the sun's bright speech is heard,     And like the sea the soul of man gives back his word.     Earth's enkindled heart     Bears benignant part     In the ardent heaven's auroral pride of prime:     If ever home on earth     Were found of heaven's grace worth     So God-beloved a birth     As here makes bright the fostering face of time,     Here, heaven bears witness, might such grace     Fall fragrant as the dewfall on that brightening face.     Here, for mine and me,     All that eyes may see     Hath more than all the wide world else of good,     All nature else of fair:     Here as none otherwhere     Heaven is the circling air,     Heaven is the homestead, heaven the wold, the wood:     The fragrance with the shadow spread     From broadening wings of cedars breathes of dawn's bright bed.     Once a dawn rose here     More divine and dear,     Rose on a birth-bed brighter far than dawn's,     Whence all the summer grew     Sweet as when earth was new     And pure as Eden's dew:     And yet its light lives on these lustrous lawns,     Clings round these wildwood ways, and cleaves     To the aisles of shadow and sun that wind unweaves and weaves.     Thoughts that smile and weep,     Dreams that hallow sleep,     Brood in the branching shadows of the trees,     Tall trees at agelong rest     Wherein the centuries nest,     Whence, blest as these are blest,     We part, and part not from delight in these;     Whose comfort, sleeping as awake,     We bear about within us as when first it spake.     Comfort as of song     Grown with time more strong,     Made perfect and prophetic as the sea,     Whose message, when it lies     Far off our hungering eyes,     Within us prophesies     Of life not ours, yet ours as theirs may be     Whose souls far off us shine and sing     As ere they sprang back sunward, swift as fire might spring.     All this oldworld pleasance     Hails a hallowing presence,     And thrills with sense of more than summer near,     And lifts toward heaven more high     The song-surpassing cry     Of rapture that July     Lives, for her love who makes it loveliest here;     For joy that she who here first drew     The breath of life she gave me breathes it here anew.     Never birthday born     Highest in height of morn     Whereout the star looks forth that leads the sun     Shone higher in love's account,     Still seeing the mid noon mount     From the eager dayspring's fount     Each year more lustrous, each like all in one;     Whose light around us and above     We could not see so lovely save by grace of love.