ayed like these,--
To sun themselves at ease;
To breathe of wind-swept spaces;
To see some miracle of leafy graces;--
To catch the out-flowing rapture of the trees.
Considering the lilies.
--Yes. And when
Shall they consider Men?

(_O showering May-clad tree,
Bear yet awhile with me._)

II

For now at last, they have beheld the trees.
Lo, even these!--
The men of sounding laughter and low fears;
The women of light laughter, and no tears;
The great ones of the town.
And those, of most renown,
That once sold doves,--now grown so pennywise
To bargain with forlorner merchandise,--
They buy and sell, they buy and sell again,
The life-long toil of men.
Worn with their market strife to dispossess
The blind,--the fatherless,
They too go forth, to breathe of budding trees,
And woods with beckoning wonders new unfurled.
Yes, even these:
The money-changers and the Pharisees;
The rulers of the darkness of this world.

(_O choiring Summer tree,
Bear yet awhile with me._)

III

For now, behold their heart's desire is thrall
To simpleness.--O new delight, unguessed,
In very rest!
And precious beyond all,
A garden-place, a garden with a wall!
To the green earth! All bountiful to bless
Hearts sickening with excess.
To the green earth, whose blithe replenishments
Shall fresh the jaded sense!
To the green earth, the dust-corrupted soul
Returns to be made whole.
For now it comes indeed,
They will go forth, all they, to see a reed
So shaken by the wind.
Men are no longer blind
To aught, save human kind.

(_O mellowing August tree,
Bear yet awhile with me._)

IV

The wonder this. For some there are no trees;
Or in the trees no beauty and no mirth:--
Those dullest millions, pent
In life-long banishment
From all the gifts and creatures of the earth,
Shut in the inner darkness of the town;
Those blighted things you see,
But the Sun sees not, at its going down:--
Warped outcasts of some human forestry;
Blind victims of the blind,
Wreckt ones and dark of mind,
With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
And if you take some Old One to the fields,
To see what Nature yields
With fullest hands to men already free,
It well may be,
As on some indecipherable book
The Guest will look,
With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to see;
Too old, too old to learn;
Or to discern--
Before it slips away,
The joy of such a late half-holiday!
Proffer those