Old earth, how beautiful thou art! Though restless fancy wander wide And sigh in dreams for spheres more Save for some trouble, half-confessed Some least misgiving, all my heart With such a world were satisfied. Had every day such skies of blue, Were men all wise, and women true, Might youth as calm as manhood be, And might calm manhood keep its lo And still be young-and one thing m Old earth were fair enough for me. Ah, sturdy world, old patient world! -Edward Rowlan Would you for a while shut out the earth and fill your eye with the heavens, lie down, some summer day, on the great mother's lap, with a soft grass pillow under your head; then look around and above you, and see how slight, apparently, is your terrestrial environment, how foreshortened has become the foreground,-only a few nodding bents of blossomed grass, a spray of clover with a bumble-bee probing for honey, and in the distance, perhaps, the billowy outline of the diminished woods. What else you see is the blue of heaven illimitably stretched above and around you. You seem to be lying not so much on the surface of the earth as at the bottom of the sky. Under this still, transparent sea, "deeper than did ever plummet sound," your own thoughts and imaginings have become a treasuretrove of inestimable wealth and rarity. You do not care to move, lest in so doing you break the deep sky charm, and your treasure-trove vanish. -Edith M. Thomas. Comy my life, have we not had seasons That only said, Live and rejoice? That asked not for causes and reasons, But made us all feeling and voice? ) When we went with the winds in their blowing, When nature and we were peers, And we seemed to share in the flowing Of the inexhaustible years? Have we not from the earth drawn juices Too fine for earth's sordid uses ? ( Have I heard, have I seen All I feel and I know? Doth my heart overween? Or could it have been Long ago?) |