blossoms faded,
While the scarlet berries grew;
And all summer they evaded
Anything they knew.

"Cornel, cornel, green and red
Flooring for the forest wide,
Whither down the ways of dread
Went my starry-eyed?"

"Mortal, mortal, is there found
Any fruitage half so fair
In the dim world underground
As there grows in air?"

"Wilding cornel, you can guess
Nothing of eternal pain,
Growing there in quietness
In the sun and rain."

"Mortal, where your heart would be
Not a wanderer may go,
But he shares the dark with me
Underneath the snow."

And the scarlet berries scattered
With the coming on of fall;
Not to one of them it mattered
Anything at all.

[Illustration]

_The Moondial_

Iron and granite and rust,
In a crumbling garden old,
Where the roses are paler than dust
And the lilies are green with gold,

Under the racing moon,
Inconscious of war or crime,
In a strange and ghostly noon,
It marks the oblivion of time.

The shadow steals through its arc,
Still as a frosted breath,
Fitful, gleaming, and dark
As the cold frustration of death.

But where the shadow may fall,
Whether to hurry or stay,
It matters little at all
To those who come that way.

For this is the dial of them
That have forgotten the world,
No more through the mad day-dream
Of striving and reason hurled.

Their heart as a little child
Only remembers the worth
Of beauty and love and the wild
Dark peace of the elder earth.

It registers the morrows
Of lovers and winds and streams,
And the face of a thousand sorrows
At the postern gate of dreams.

When the first low laughter smote
Through Lilith, the mother of joy,
And died and revived from the throat
Of Helen, the harpstring of Troy,

And wandering on through the years,
From the sobbing rain and the sea,
Caught sound of the world's gray tears
Or sense of the sun's gold glee,

Whenever the wild control
Burned out to a mortal kiss,
And the shuddering storm-swept soul
Climbed to its acme of bliss,

The green-gold light of the dead
Stood still in purple space,
And a record blind and dread
Was graved on the dial's face.

And once in a thousand years
Some youth who loved so well
The gods had loosed him from fears
In a vision of blameless hell,

Has gone to the dial to read
Those signs in the outland tongue,
Written beyond the need
Of the simple and the young.

For immortal life, they say,
Were his who, loving so,
Could explain the writing away