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Ere that small sisterhood of misty stars, The Pleiadës, consents to grace the sky; While still through sunset’s golds and cinnabars The evening-star, like an Aladdin eye Of bright enchantment, at the day’s last hour, Looks downward from its twilight-builded tower, Listen, and you may hear, now low, now high, A voice, a summons, fainter than a flower.

There is a fellowship so still and sweet, A brotherhood, that speaks, unwordable, In every tree, in every stream you meet, The soul is fain to dream beneath its spell.-- And heart-admitted to their presence there, Those intimacies of the earth and air, It shall hear things too wonderful to tell, Too deep to interpret, and more sweet than prayer.

And you may see the things that are unseen, And hear the things that never have been heard: The whisper of the woods, in gray and green, Will walk by you, its heart a wildwood bird; Or by your side, in hushed and solemn wise, The silence sit; and clothed in glimmering dyes Of pearl and purple, with a sunset word, The dusk steal to you with tenebrious eyes.

Then through the ugliness that toils in night. Uncouth, obscure, that hates the glare of day, Dull things that pierce the earth, avoid the light, And hide themselves in clamminess and clay,-- The dumb, ungainly things, that make a home Of mud and mire they hill and honeycomb,-- Through these, perhaps, in some mysterious way Beauty may speak, fairer than wind-wild foam.

Not as it speaks--an eagle message--drawn In starry vastness from night’s labyrinths: Not uttering itself from forth the dawn In egret hues: nor from the cloud-built plinths Of sunset’s splendor, speaking burningly Unto the spirit; nor from flow’rs the bee Makes mouths of musk of, cymes of hyacinths,-- But from the things that type humility.

From things despised.--Ev’n from the crawfish there, Hollowing its house of ooze--a wet, vague sound Of sleepy slime; or from the mole, whose lair, Blind-tunneled, corridors the earth around-- Beauty may draw her truths, as draws its wings The butterfly from the dull worm that clings, Cocoon and chrysalis; and from the ground Address the soul through even senseless things.

The soul, that oft hath heard the trees’ huge roots Fumble the darkness, clutching at the soil; The bird-like beaks of the imprisoned shoots Peck through the bark and into leaves uncoil; Hath heard the buried seed split through its pod, Groping its blind way up to light and God; The fungus, laboring with gnome-like toil, Heave slow its white orb through the encircling sod.

The winds and waters, stars and streams and flowers, The very stones have tongues: and moss and fern And even lichens speak. This world of ours Is eloquent with things that bid us learn To pierce appearances, and so to mark, Within the rock and underneath the bark, Heard through some inward sense, the dreams that turn Outward to light and beauty from the dark.