Inter Vias

'Tis a land where no hurricane falls,     But the infinite azure regards     Its waters for ever, its walls     Of granite, its limitless swards;     Where the fens to their innermost pool     With the chorus of May are aring,     And the glades are wind-winnowed and cool     With perpetual spring;     Where folded and half withdrawn     The delicate wind-flowers blow,     And the bloodroot kindles at dawn     Her spiritual taper of snow;     Where the limits are met and spanned     By a waste that no husbandman tills,     And the earth-old pine forests stand     In the hollows of hills.     'Tis the land that our babies behold,     Deep gazing when none are aware;     And the great-hearted seers of old     And the poets have known it, and there     Made halt by the well-heads of truth     On their difficult pilgrimage     From the rose-ruddy gardens of youth     To the summits of age.     Now too, as of old, it is sweet     With a presence remote and serene;     Still its byways are pressed by the feet     Of the mother immortal, its queen:     The huntress whose tresses, flung free,     And her fillets of gold, upon earth,     They only have honour to see     Who are dreamers from birth.     In her calm and her beauty supreme,     They have found her at dawn or at eve,     By the marge of some motionless stream,     Or where shadows rebuild or unweave     In a murmurous alley of pine,     Looking upward in silent surprise,     A figure, slow-moving, divine,     With inscrutable eyes.