o show the sap is leaping,
There's not a blade and not an ear
Escaped from winter's keeping--
But there's a something in the air
A something here, a something there,
A restless something everywhere--
A stirring in the sleeping!

A robin's sudden, thrilling note!
And see--the sky is bluer!
The world, so ancient yesterday,
To-day seems strangely newer;
All that was wearisome and stale
Has wrapped itself in rosy veil--
The wraith of winter, grown so pale
That smiling spring peeps through her!

The Homesteader

WIND-SWEPT and fire-swept and swept with bitter rain,
This was the world I came to when I came across the sea--
Sun-drenched and panting, a pregnant, waiting plain
Calling out to humankind, calling out to me!

Leafy lanes and gentle skies and little fields all green,
This was the world I came from when I fared across the sea--
The mansion and the village and the farmhouse in between,
Never any room for more, never room for me!

I've fought the wind and braved it; I cringe to it no more!
I've fought the creeping fire back and cheered to see it die.
I've shut the bitter rain outside and, safe within my door,
Laughed to think I feared a thing not so strong as I!

I mind the long, white road that ran between the hedgerows neat,
In that little, strange old world I left behind me long ago,
I mind the air so full of bells at evening, far and sweet--
All and all for someone else--I had leave to go!

It cost a tear to leave it--but here across the sea
With miles and miles of unused sky, and miles of unturned loam,
And miles of room for someone else, and miles of room for me
I've found a bigger meaning for the little word called "Home."

Wet Weather

IT is the English in me that loves the soft, wet weather--
The cloud upon the mountain, the mist upon the sea,
The sea-gull flying low and near with rain upon each feather,
The scent of deep, green woodlands where the buds are breaking free.

A world all hot with sunshine, with a hot, white sky above it--
Oh then I feel an alien in a land I'd call my own;
The rain is like a friend's caress, I lean to it and love it,
'Tis like a finger on a nerve that thrills for it alone!

Is it the secret kinship which each new life is given
To link it by an age-long chain to those whose lives are through,
That wheresoever he may go, by fate or fancy driven,
The home-star rises in his heart to keep the compass tru