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The House Beautiful

NAKED house, a naked moor,
A shivering pool before the door,
A garden bare of flowers and fruit
And poplars at the garden foot:
Such is the place that I live in,
Bleak without and bare within.

Yet shall your ragged moor receive
The incomparable pomp of eve,
And the cold glories of the dawn
Behind your shivering trees be drawn;
And when the wind from place to place
Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,
Your garden gloom and gleam again,
With leaping sun, with glancing rain.
Here shall the wizard moon ascend
The heavens, in the crimson end
Of day's declining splendour; here
The army of the stars appear.
The neighbour hollows dry or wet,
Spring shall with tender flowers beset;
And oft the morning muser see
Larks rising from the broomy lea,
And every fairy wheel and thread
Of cobweb dew-bediamonded.
When daisies go, shall winter time
Silver the simple grass with rime;
Autumnal frosts enchant the pool
And make the cart-ruts beautiful;
And when snow-bright the moor expands,
How shall your children clap their hands!
To make this earth our hermitage,
A cheerful and a changeful page,
God's bright and intricate device
Of days and seasons doth suffice,

R. L. Stevenson.

N the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens

Quiet eyes;

Where essential silence cheers and blesses,

And for ever in the hill-recesses

Her more lovely music

Broods and dies.

O to mount again where erst I haunted; Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted, meadows

And the low green

Bright with sward;

And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow

Lamp-bestarred!

O to dream, O to awake and wander

There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence,

Quiet breath;

Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,

Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,

Life and death.

R. L. Stevenson.

The fair hills of Eirè

HE dewdrops lie bright 'mid the grass and yellow corn

On the fair hills of Eirè, O!

The sweet-scented apples blush redly in the

morn

On the fair hills of Eirè, O!

The water-cress and sorrel fill the vales below,
The streamlets are hushed till the evening breezes blow,
While the waves of the Suir, noble river! ever flow

Near the fair hills of Eirè, O!

A fruitful clime is Eirè, through valley, meadow, plain, And the fair hills of Eirè, O!

The very bread of life is in the yellow grain

On the fair hills of Eirè, O!

Far dearer unto me than the tones music yields
Is the lowing of her kine and the calves in her fields,
And the sunlight that shone long ago on the shields
Of the Gaels, on the fair hills of Eirè, O!
Translated from the Gaelic by J. C. Mangan.

Ireland

WAS the dream of a God,

And the mould of His hand,
That you shook 'neath His stroke,
That you trembled and broke
To this beautiful land.

Here He loosed from His hand
A brown tumult of wings,

Till the wind on the sea
Bore the strange melody
Of an island that sings.

He made you all fair,

You in purple and gold,
You in silver and green,
Till no eye that has seen
Without love can behold.

I have left you behind

In the path of the past,

With the white breath of flowers,

With the best of God's hours,

I have left you at last.

Wild are all her coasts with war of cliff and

billow,

On her northern moorland is little sheltered ease.

Well is with the salmon, ranger of her rivers;
Well is with the mackerel shoaling in each bay,
Dear is all the land to the lonely snipe and curlew;
Ay, but for its manfolk: a bitter lot have they.

Thankless is the soil: men trench, and delve, and labour,
Black and heartless peat amid barren knowes of stone:
Then to win a living overseas they travel,

And their women gather, if God pleases, 'what was

sown,

Harvesters a-homing from the golden tilth of England, Where they sweat to cope with increase of teeming years,

Find too oft returning, sick with others' plenty,

Sunless autumn dank upon green and spindling ears.

Or a tainted south wind brings upon the root-crop Stench of rotting fibre and green leaf turning black: Famine, never distant, stalks nearer now and nearer, Bids them rake like crows amid mussel - beds and wrack.

Bleak and grey to man is the countenance of Nature; Bleak her soil below him, bleak her sky above; Wherefore, then, by man is her rare smile so cherished? Paid her niggard bounty with so lavish love?

Not the slopes of Rhine with such yearning are remembered;

Not your Kentish orchards, not your Devon lanes. 'Tis as though her sons for that ungentle mother Knew a mother's tenderness, felt a mother's pains.

Many an outward-bound, as the ship heads under Tory, Clings with anguished eyes to the barren Fanad shore. Many a homeward-bound, as they lift the frowning Foreland,

Pants to leap the leagues to his desolate Gweedore.

There about the ways God's air is free and spacious: Warm are chimney - corners there, warm the kindly heart:

There the soul of man takes root, and through its travail Grips the rocky anchorage till the life-strings part.

Stephen Gwynn.