THE TRAVELLERS

THEY made them ready and we saw them go

Out of our very lives;

Yet this world holds them all,
And soon it must befall

That we shall know

How this one fares, how that one thrives;
And one day who knows when?
They shall be with us here again.

Another traveller left us late
Whose life was as the soul of ours;

A stranger guest went with him to the gate, And closed it breathing back a breath of flowers.

And what the eyes we loved now look upon,
What industries the hands employ,
In what new speech the tongue hath joy,
We may not know - until one day,
And then another, as our toil is done,
The same still guest shall visit us,
And one by one

Shall take us by the hand and say,
"Come with me to the country marvellous,
Where he has dwelt so long beyond your

sight.

'T were idle waiting for his own return That ne'er shall be; face the perpetual light, And with him learn

PROEM

THERE is no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling

wheat;

There is no metre that's half so fine
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird. -
If the wind and the brook and the bird
would teach

My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art that they say these

with,

My soul would sing of beauty and myth In a rhyme and a metre that none before