l song
Remain; these days are short, but now the nights
Intense and long, hang out their utmost lights;
Such starry nights are long, yet not too long;
Frost nips the weak, while strengthening still the strong
Against that day when Spring sets all to rights.

20.

A hundred thousand birds salute the day:--
One solitary bird salutes the night:
Its mellow grieving wiles our grief away,
And tunes our weary watches to delight;
It seems to sing the thoughts we cannot say,
To know and sing them, and to set them right;
Until we feel once more that May is May,
And hope some buds may bloom without a blight.
This solitary bird outweighs, outvies,
The hundred thousand merry-making birds
Whose innocent warblings yet might make us wise
Would we but follow when they bid us rise,
Would we but set their notes of praise to words
And launch our hearts up with them to the skies.

21.

A host of things I take on trust: I take
The nightingales on trust, for few and far
Between those actual summer moments are
When I have heard what melody they make.
So chanced it once at Como on the Lake:
But all things, then, waxed musical; each star
Sang on its course, each breeze sang on its car,
All harmonies sang to senses wide-awake.
All things in tune, myself not out of tune,
Those nightingales were nightingales indeed:
Yet truly an owl had satisfied my need,
And wrought a rapture underneath that moon,
Or simple sparrow chirping from a reed;
For June that night glowed like a doubled June.

22.

The mountains in their overwhelming might
Moved me to sadness when I saw them first,
And afterwards they moved me to delight;
Struck harmonies from silent chords which burst
Out into song, a song by memory nursed;
Forever unrenewed by touch or sight
Sleeps the keen magic of each day or night,
In pleasure and in wonder then immersed.
All Switzerland behind us on the ascent,
All Italy before us we plunged down
St. Gothard, garden of forget-me-not:
Yet why should such a flower choose such a spot?
Could we forget that way which once we went
Though not one flower had bloomed to weave its crown?

23.

Beyond the seas we know stretch seas unknown,
Blue and bright-colored for o