11
IV.
Oh! forest world, thou gorgeous affluence
Of beauty, grandeur, magic, horror, wonder,
Infinite treasures of form and sense,
Light, color, shadow, scent and sound, as under
Day’s glowing kiss awoke to consciousness
How passing fair! how clothe them in its sheen,
Haughty, the veterans of thy wilderness,
Waving their tropic wealth of glowing green,
Flashing in emerald waves, a sea of splendour.
But to the lower cycles of the grove
Day from its crowned monarchs deigns to rove
Down to where yet a second forest tenders
(Being but itself those giants’ undergrowth,)
Shelter to thickets lower yet and blending
Leaves great and small in wealth of forms unending,
Fantastic groups you here may see of both
Plumes and enormous fans which all around
Spread from the palms’ slim crowns a feather frond
Massed into stately vault or ribbed network,
Here emerald blades, here fringe of fairy fretwork;
And amid all those feather-forms unending
Sportively night here battles with the daylight,
’Mid a myriad shadows, exquisitely blending,
Till, lower chased, she walks the dusky grey light,
Free and unchallenged, in perpetual shades
Where through her poisoned weeds entangled waste
Slime and morass and serpent root enlaced
No glance of curious day her gloom invades.
But up above light strings a hundred bows
And iris sparks. There, spreading in a rose
