O DAPPLED throat of white! Shy, hidden bird!

Perched in green dimness of the dewy wood,

And murmuring, in that lonely, lover mood,

Thy heart-ache, softly heard, Sweetened by distance, over land and lake.

Why, like a kinsman, do I feel thy voice
Awaken voices in me free and sweet?
Was there some far ancestral birdhood
fleet

That rose and would rejoice:
A broken cycle rounded in a song?

The lake, like steady wine in a deep cup, Lay crystal in the curving mountain. deeps;

And now the air brought that long lyric up That sobs, then falls and weeps, And hushes silence into listening hope.

Is it that we were sprung of one old kin, Children of brooding earth, that lets us tell,

Thou from thy rhythmic throat, I deep within,

These syllables of her spell, This hymned wisdom of her pondering years?

For thou hast spoken song-wise in a tongue
I knew not till I heard the buried air
Burst from the boughs and bring me
what thou sung,

Here where the lake lies bare
To reaching summits and the azure sky.

Thy music is a language of the trees, The brown soil, and the never-trodden brake;

Translatress art thou of dumb mysteries

That dream through wood and lake; And I, in thee, have uttered what I am!

A PINE-TREE BUOY

WHERE all the winds were tranquil,
And all the odors sweet,
And rings of tumbling upland
Sloped down to kiss your feet:

There, in a nest of verdure,
You grew from bud to bough;
You heard the song at mid-day, -
At eve the plighted vow.

But fate that gives a guerdon

Takes back a double fee: She hewed you from your homestead And set you in the sea.

And every bowling billow

Bends down your barren head To hearken if the whisper Of what you knew is dead.

MOHAMMED AND SEID

SWEPT by the hot wind, stark, untrackable,
The stony desert stretches to the sky.
Deep-printed shadows at the tent-door lie,
And camels slumber by the burning well.
One weeps within, wrinkled and dusk of face,
White-haired and lordly, o'er the new-
brought dead:

Mohammed over Seid, who loved and read
Truth in the master when a fierce disgrace
Burned in his blood and none would heed

the word.

"Behold the Prophet how he mourns a slave !"

So the slave's daughter, and Mohammed heard: