Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/33

Before his eyes all fixed, corporeal things
Melted to vision, his habitual world;
And all experience to his hand was clay,
The stuff of life, wherein his moulding thought
Mysterious moved, and fashioned, like a god's,—
The poet's art-instinctive in his life,
Not for the world, but his own natural breath
Whereby he greatened and grew into man,
True man and whole, at one with this dark frame,
By penetration mastering the sphere
In secret study, and at one with man,
Merging with men by love and sympathy
And old imaginations fusing might
Confederating man in human fate.
Now on he bore unto the place of dread,
Youth gone and manhood come; soon should his soul
Encounter fate; slowly those mountains rose,
And morning turned to night upon their slopes,
And in their shadow now the Roamer moved,
And nothing else but that great vision saw
Of earth or heaven or any human face.
Up soared aloft the lone eternal steep;
He knew the Range that borders on the night—
To North and South its summits blocked the sky,
Before in silence stood its awful front;