thousand years
Flit at its feet while fancy steers.
No face of all its faces to me
Is known--no passion of it or pain.
It is but a city by the sea,
Enshrined forever beyond my eyes!

VIA AMOROSA

(_To A. H. R._)

When we two walk, my love, on the path
The moon makes over the sea,
To the end of the world where sorrow hath
An end that is ecstasy,
Should we not think of the other road
Of wearying dust and stone
Our feet would fare did each but care
To follow the way alone?

When we two slip at night to the skies
And find one star that we keep
As a trysting-place to which our eyes
May lead our souls ere sleep,
Should we not pause for a little space
And think how many must sigh
Because they gaze over starry ways
With no heart-comrade by?

When we two then lie down to our dreams
That deepen still the delight
Of our wandering where stars and streams
Stray in immortal light,
Should we not grieve with the myriads
From East of earth to West
Who lay them down at night but to drown
The longing for some loved breast?

Ah, yes, for life has a thousand gifts,
But love it is gives life.
Who walks thro his world alone e'er lifts
A soul that is sorrow-rife.
But they to whom it is given to tread
The moon-path and not sink
Can ever say the unhappiest way
Earth has is fair to the brink.

DUSK AT HIROSHIMA

Softly the bamboo bends
As the sun sinks down unglowing,
Softer the willow ends
A sigh to the dusk around.
Quickly the brief bat wends
His flittering way, thro flowing
Fields of the autumn air,
That are husht of the city's sound.

Temple and thatch and stream
Are forgetting the light that lingers,
Mountain and mist in dream
Already are lost, afar.
Faintingly comes the beam
Of the moon--then viewless fingers
Tinkle a samisen,
And astir on the East is a star.

THE WANDERER

When moonlight on the face
Of the great Buddha falls
As he sits in Nirvana
On the shores of Kamakura,
When the pines about him place
Soft shadows at his feet
Like offerings of penitence and tears,
I hear in the grace
Of the wind's low susurra
A voice that calls me still
To my home within the West,
But I've lingered overlong
In the East's strange arcana
And no more is there desire within my breast.

I left it when a boy,
That far home and, alas,
'Twas so fair that my dreaming
Earth had f