WARM and still is the summer night, | |
| As here by the river’s brink I wander; | |
| White overhead are the stars, and white | |
| The glimmering lamps on the hillside yonder. | |
| |
| Silent are all the sounds of day; | 5 |
| Nothing I hear but the chirp of crickets, | |
| And the cry of the herons winging their way | |
| O’er the poet’s house in the Elmwood thickets. | |
| |
| Call to him, herons, as slowly you pass | |
| To your roosts in the haunts of the exiled thrushes, | 10 |
| Sing him the song of the green morass, | |
| And the tides that water the reeds and rushes. | |
| |
| Sing him the mystical Song of the Hern, | |
| And the secret that baffles our utmost seeking; | |
| For only a sound of lament we discern, | 15 |
| And cannot interpret the words you are speaking. | |
| |
| Sing of the air, and the wild delight | |
| Of wings that uplift and winds that uphold you, | |
| The joy of freedom, the rapture of flight | |
| Through the drift of the floating mists that infold you; | 20 |
| |
| Of the landscape lying so far below, | |
| With its towns and rivers and desert places; | |
| And the splendor of light above, and the glow | |
| Of the limitless, blue, ethereal spaces. | |
| |
| Ask him if songs of the Troubadours, | 25 |
| Or of Minnesingers in old black-letter, | |
| Sound in his ears more sweet than yours, | |
| And if yours are not sweeter and wilder and better. | |
| |
| Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate, | |
| Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting, | 30 |
| Some one hath lingered to meditate, | |
| And send him unseen this friendly greeting; | |
| |
| That many another hath done the same, | |
| Though not by a sound was the silence broken; | |
| The surest pledge of a deathless name | 35 |
| Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken. | |
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