Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/123

The aspiring forests island the great gulf,
Primeval growths; soon in dark solitudes
He entered 'mid impenetrable shades,
By trunk and arch of nature's majesty,
The haunts of primal awe, man's earliest dread.
Ah, never had he felt such loneliness
Assail him, nor his soul so isolate
And lost in nature's vast, as in the hush
And shadow of that many-centuried wood!
It seemed coeval with creation's morn.
Monarchs of time stood there, like stem and limb
From Lebanon or Himalaya brought,
Hoar cedar, tall pines, dim sequoias huge
That still on earth salute the stars and winds
As equals, mixing with the heavenly roof;
So stood this forest grove majestical,
O'erblown with leafy flora of the vale,
In immemorial secular growth obscure.
The abode of unimaginable peace
Life seemed within the valley, and the soul
An alien in that natural paradise.
Sounding remote as reefs on unseen seas
He heard the long-drawn soughing of the pine
Begin, and die away down the dark trail
In the dense wild; there, brooding what should be,

He rounded pillared rocks, and found a shelf