The Height Of Land

Here is the height of land:     The watershed on either hand     Goes down to Hudson Bay     Or Lake Superior;     The stars are up, and far away     The wind sounds in the wood, wearier     Than the long Ojibway cadence     In which Potn the Wise     Declares the ills of life     And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound     Of acquiescence. The fires burn low     With just sufficient glow     To light the flakes of ash that play     At being moths, and flutter away     To fall in the dark and die as ashes:     Here there is peace in the lofty air,     And Something comes by flashes     Deeper than peace; -     The spruces have retired a little space     And left a field of sky in violet shadow     With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.     Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;     There is no sound unless the soul can hear     The gathering of the waters in their sources.     We have come up through the spreading lakes     From level to level, -     Pitching our tents sometimes over a revel     Of roses that nodded all night,     Dreaming within our dreams,     To wake at dawn and find that they were captured     With no dew on their leaves;     Sometimes mid sheaves     Of braken and dwarf-cornel, and again     On a wide blue-berry plain     Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;     A rocky islet followed     With one lone poplar and a single nest     Of white-throat-sparrows that took no rest     But sang in dreams or woke to sing, -     To the last portage and the height of land - :     Upon one hand     The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,     And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,     Glimmering all night     In the cold arctic light;     On the other hand     The crowded southern land     With all the welter of the lives of men.     But here is peace, and again     That Something comes by flashes     Deeper than peace, - a spell     Golden and inappellable     That gives the inarticulate part     Of our strange being one moment of release     That seems more native than the touch of time,     And we must answer in chime;     Though yet no man may tell     The secret of that spell     Golden and inappellable.     Now are there sounds walking in the wood,     And all the spruces shiver and tremble,     And the stars move a little in their courses.     The ancient disturber of solitude     Breathes a pervasive sigh,     And the soul seems to hear     The gathering of the waters at their sources;     Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark;     The region-spirit murmurs in meditation,     The heart replies in exaltation     And echoes faintly like an inland shell     Ghost tremors of the spell;     Thought reawakens and is linked again     With all the welter of the lives of men.     Here on the uplands where the air is clear     We think of life as of a stormy scene, -     Of tempest, of revolt and desperate shock;     And here, where we can think, on the bright uplands     Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on life     Until the tempest parts, and it appears     As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:     A Something to be guided by ideals -     That in themselves are simple and serene -     Of noble deed to foster noble thought,     And noble thought to image noble deed,     Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,     Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt     Whether the perfect beauty that escapes     Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing     Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:     Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest     The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,     And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.     The ancient disturber of solitude     Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,     And the dark wood     Is stifled with the pungent fume     Of charred earth burnt to the bone     That takes the place of air.     Then sudden I remember when and where, -     The last weird lakelet foul with weedy growths     And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,     Skin of vile water over viler mud     Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,     And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,     Not to be urged toward the fatal shore     Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden roar     Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with light     And terror. It had left the portage-height     A tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,     Covered still with patches of bright fire     Smoking with incense of the fragrant resin     That even then began to thin and lessen     Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.     'Tis overpast. How strange the stars have grown;     The presage of extinction glows on their crests     And they are beautied with impermanence;     They shall be after the race of men     And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,     Entangled in the meshes of bright words.     A lemming stirs the fern and in the mosses     Eft-minded things feel the air change, and dawn     Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.     How often in the autumn of the world     Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be rebuilt     With deeper meaning! Shall the poet then,     Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,     Brood on the welter of the lives of men     And dream of his ideal hope and promise     In the blush sunrise? Shall he base his flight     Upon a more compelling law than Love     As Life's atonement; shall the vision     Of noble deed and noble thought immingled     Seem as uncouth to him as the pictograph     Scratched on the cave side by the cave-dweller     To us of the Christ-time? Shall he stand     With deeper joy, with more complex emotion,     In closer commune with divinity,     With the deep fathomed, with the firmament charted,     With life as simple as a sheep-boy's song,     What lies beyond a romaunt that was read     Once on a morn of storm and laid aside     Memorious with strange immortal memories?     Or shall he see the sunrise as I see it     In shoals of misty fire the deluge-light     Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,     And feel the lulled earth, older in pulse and motion,     Turn the rich lands and the inundant oceans     To the flushed color, and hear as now I hear     The thrill of life beat up the planet's margin     And break in the clear susurrus of deep joy     That echoes and rechoes in my being?     O Life is intuition the measure of knowledge     And do I stand with heart entranced and burning     At the zenith of our wisdom when I feel     The long light flow, the long wind pause, the deep     Influx of spirit, of which no man may tell     The Secret, golden and inappellable?