Fragments On Nature And Life - Nature

The patient Pan,     Drunken with nectar,     Sleeps or feigns slumber,     Drowsily humming     Music to the march of time.     This poor tooting, creaking cricket,     Pan, half asleep, rolling over     His great body in the grass,     Tooting, creaking,     Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;     'T is his manner,     Well he knows his own affair,     Piling mountain chains of phlegm     On the nervous brain of man,     As he holds down central fires     Under Alps and Andes cold;     Haply else we could not live,     Life would be too wild an ode.     Come search the wood for flowers,--     Wild tea and wild pea,     Grapevine and succory,     Coreopsis     And liatris,     Flaunting in their bowers;     Grass with green flag half-mast high,     Succory to match the sky,     Columbine with horn of honey,     Scented fern and agrimony;     Forest full of essences     Fit for fairy presences,     Peppermint and sassafras,     Sweet fern, mint and vernal grass,     Panax, black birch, sugar maple,     Sweet and scent for Dian's table,     Elder-blow, sarsaparilla,     Wild rose, lily, dry vanilla,--     Spices in the plants that run     To bring their first fruits to the sun.     Earliest heats that follow frore     Nervd leaf of hellebore,     Sweet willow, checkerberry red,     With its savory leaf for bread.     Silver birch and black     With the selfsame spice     Found in polygala root and rind,     Sassafras, fern, benzine,     Mouse-ear, cowslip, wintergreen,     Which by aroma may compel     The frost to spare, what scents so well.     Where the fungus broad and red     Lifts its head,     Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread,     Where the aster grew     With the social goldenrod,     In a chapel, which the dew     Made beautiful for God:--     O what would Nature say?     She spared no speech to-day:     The fungus and the bulrush spoke,     Answered the pine-tree and the oak,     The wizard South blew down the glen,     Filled the straits and filled the wide,     Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.     All things shine in his smoky ray,     And all we see are pictures high;     Many a high hillside,     While oaks of pride     Climb to their tops,     And boys run out upon their leafy ropes.     The maple street     In the houseless wood,     Voices followed after,     Every shrub and grape leaf     Rang with fairy laughter.     I have heard them fall     Like the strain of all     King Oberon's minstrelsy.     Would hear the everlasting     And know the only strong?     You must worship fasting,     You must listen long.     Words of the air     Which birds of the air     Carry aloft, below, around,     To the isles of the deep,     To the snow-capped steep,     To the thundercloud.     For Nature, true and like in every place,     Will hint her secret in a garden patch,     Or in lone corners of a doleful heath,     As in the Andes watched by fleets at sea,     Or the sky-piercing horns of Himmaleh;     And, when I would recall the scenes I dreamed     On Adirondac steeps, I know     Small need have I of Turner or Daguerre,     Assured to find the token once again     In silver lakes that unexhausted gleam     And peaceful woods beside my cottage door.     What all the books of ages paint, I have.     What prayers and dreams of youthful genius feign,     I daily dwell in, and am not so blind     But I can see the elastic tent of day     Belike has wider hospitality     Than my few needs exhaust, and bids me read     The quaint devices on its mornings gay.     Yet Nature will not be in full possessed,     And they who truliest love her, heralds are     And harbingers of a majestic race,     Who, having more absorbed, more largely yield,     And walk on earth as the sun walks in the sphere.     But never yet the man was found     Who could the mystery expound,     Though Adam, born when oaks were young,     Endured, the Bible says, as long;     But when at last the patriarch died     The Gordian noose was still untied.     He left, though goodly centuries old,     Meek Nature's secret still untold.     Atom from atom yawns as far     As moon from earth, or star from star.     When all their blooms the meadows flaunt     To deck the morning of the year,     Why tinge thy lustres jubilant     With forecast or with fear?     Teach me your mood, O patient stars!     Who climb each night the ancient sky,     Leaving on space no shade, no scars,     No trace of age, no fear to die.     The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin     To use my land to put his rainbows in.     For joy and beauty planted it,     With faerie gardens cheered,     And boding Fancy haunted it     With men and women weird.     What central flowing forces, say,     Make up thy splendor, matchless day?     Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more;     In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door,     A door to something grander,--loftier walls, and vaster floor.     She paints with white and red the moors     To draw the nations out of doors.     A score of airy miles will smooth     Rough Monadnoc to a gem.