The Path

It winds its way along the shaded hill, Disdaining distance, seeking only ease. It turns aside to linger by a rill, It climbs a slope to rest beneath the trees Or breathe the perfume of a Summer breeze.

Here time is nothing, haste a thing unknown-- The hot, straight highway for the craze of speed; The path is made for them who walk alone, Whose God is Nature, and the woods their creed, To follow blindly where the path may lead.

No stern surveyor made it thus and so, Nor north nor south nor east nor west it tends. It dips to kiss the pool where lilies grow, It rises joyously where ivy bends And meets in fond embraces with its friends.

Through brooding branches and embroidered leaves The sunshine filters in a golden rain, Transforms the tufted weeds to shining sheaves, The tangled grass to waving harvest grain, The marshy muskeg to a purple plain.

This is a path of velvet from the loom Of droning Summer. Never human hand Wove such a pattern, bright with rose abloom Along its border. Never artist planned This brilliant carpet flung across the land.

Now princes leave their castles, kings their thrones, And unattended walk these sylvan aisles. They pause to muse beside this heap of stones More beautiful than all the granite piles Reared with slow labor on their ample miles.

Sweet, solemn splendor of the silent wood, More dear you are than all the haunts of men; For never mortal in your presence stood And listened to the whisper of the glen But songs forgotten sang to him again.

Perhaps it is his mother’s voice he hears, The faint reëcho of her cradle croon That sends him groping down the ended years To find again some long-discarded boon, To find again some long-departed June.

Then, by the magic of the shade and sun, Of tree and rose and brook and verdant sod, This world shall seem to be that other one Where feet walk never, yet where souls have trod-- And he shall hold communion with his God.