said,
_All names mean God, perchance!"_

THE BIRTH

THERE is a legend that the love of God
So quickened under Mary's heart it wrought
Her very maidenhood to holier stuff....
However that may be, the birth befell
Upon a night when all the Syrian stars
Swayed tremulous before one lordlier orb
That rose in gradual splendor,
Paused,
Flooding the firmament with mystic light,
And dropped upon the breathing hills
A sudden music
Like a distillation from its gleams;
A rain of spirit and a dew of song!

A MOOD OF PAVLOWA

THE soul of the Spring through its body of earth
Bursts in a bloom of fire,
And the crocuses come in a rainbow riot of mirth....
They flutter, they burn, they take wing, they
aspire....
Wings, motion and music and flame,
Flower, woman and laughter, and all these the
same!
She is light and first love and the youth of the
world,
She is sandaled with joy ... she is lifted and
whirled,
She is flung, she is swirled, she is driven along
By the carnival winds that have torn her away
From the coronal bloom on the brow of the
May....
She is youth, she is foam, she is flame, she is
visible Song!

THE POOL

REACH over, my Undine, and clutch me a reed--
Nymph of mine idleness, notch me a pipe--
For I am fulfilled of the silence, and long
For to utter the sense of the silence in song.

Down-stream all the rapids are troubled with pebbles
That fetter and fret what the water would utter,
And it rushes and splashes in tremulous trebles;
It makes haste through the shallows, its soul is
aflutter;

But here all the sound is serene and outspread
In the murmurous moods of a slow-swirling pool;
Here all the sounds are unhurried and cool;
Every silence is kith to a sound; they are wed,
They are mated, are mingled, are tangled, are
bound;
Every hush is in love with a sound, every sound
By the law of its life to some silence is bound.

Then here will we hide; idle here and abide,
In the covert here, close by the waterside--
Here, where the slim flattered reeds are aquiver
With the exquisite hints of the reticent river,
Here, where the lips of this pool are the lips
Of all pools, let us listen and question and wait;
Let us hark to the whispers of love and of death,
Let us hark to the lispings of life and of fate-