VOICES OF THE VELDT.
Land! I will show you land; mile upon mile
Of ridge and kopje, bush and candid waste,
Sun-drowned and empty, tacit as the sea,
Belted about with the horizon line,
And over all the blank and curving sky.
Is it not still? And with the sacred calm
Of cool church shadows, where one speaks and moves
As though God spied upon one; and all things—
Trespassing sunbeams, spiders, swarming motes,
The profile of a woman at her prayers,
The tang that rules the sermon, one's own thoughts—
Go bowed below a dread significance.
You know the feeling; but the veldt, my veldt,
Is more than any church, more vastly still
Than grey cathedrals drowsing down the years,
More fraught with solemn meanings and dim dreams,
Than any storied hive of shaveling saints.
Still, did I say? Well, still it surely is,
And yet it hath a voice, its mood of sound,
As prophets, meanly meditating, start
From torpor into fired utterance.
On its occasion it will speak in tones
That thundered first of all on Sinai.
The voice of all the world and all the sky
Poured through the tempest-trumpet, and, between
The drum of sullen strength and passion's shrill,
Riding above the thunder and the wind,
