The Fruit-Gift

Last night, just as the tints of autumns sky     Of sunset faded from our hills and streams,     I sat, vague listening, lapped in twilight dreams,     To the leafs rustle, and the crickets cry.     Then, like that basket, flush with summer fruit,     Dropped by the angels at the Prophets foot,     Came, unannounced, a gift of clustered sweetness,     Full-orbed, and glowing with the prisoned beams     Of summery suns, and rounded to completeness     By kisses of the south-wind and the dew.     Thrilled with a glad surprise, methought I knew     The pleasure of the homeward-turning Jew,     When Eshcols clusters on his shoulders lay,     Dropping their sweetness on his desert way.     I said, This fruit beseems no world of sin.     Its parent vine, rooted in Paradise,     Oercrept the wall, and never paid the price     Of the great mischief, an ambrosial tree,     Edens exotic, somehow smuggled in,     To keep the thorns and thistles company.     Perchance our frail, sad mother plucked in haste     A single vine-slip as she passed the gate,     Where the dread sword alternate paled and burned,     And the stern angel, pitying her fate,     Forgave the lovely trespasser, and turned     Aside his face of fire; and thus the waste     And fallen world hath yet its annual taste     Of primal good, to prove of sin the cost,     And show by one gleaned ear the mighty harvest lost.