A Dreamer of Dreams

He lived beyond men, and so stoodAdmitted to the brotherhoodOf beauty:--dreams, with which he trodCompanioned like some sylvan god.And oft men wondered, when his thoughtMade all their knowledge seem as naught,If he, like Uther's mystic son,Had not been born for Avalon.

When wandering mid the whispering trees,His soul communed with every breeze;Heard voices calling from the glades,Bloom-words of the Leimoniäds;Or Dryads of the ash and oak,Who syllabled his name and spokeWith him of presences and powersThat glimpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers.

By every violet-hallowed brook,Where every bramble-matted nookRippled and laughed with water sounds,He walked like one on sainted grounds,Fearing intrusion on the spellThat kept some fountain-spirit's well,Or woodland genius, sitting whereRed, racy berries kissed his hair.

Once when the wind, far o'er the hill,Had fall'n and left the wildwood stillFor Dawn's dim feet to trail across,--Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss,The air around him golden-ripeWith daybreak,--there, with oaten pipe,His eyes beheld the wood-god, Pan,Goat-bearded, horned; half brute, half man;Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhymeBlew in his reed to rudest time;And swollen-jowled, with rolling eye--Beneath the slowly silvering sky,Whose rose streaked through the forest's roof--Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoofThe branch was snapped, and, interfusedBetween gnarled roots, the moss was bruised.

And often when he wandered throughOld forests at the fall of dew--A new Endymion, who soughtA beauty higher than all thought--Some night, men said, most surely heWould favored be of deity:That in the holy solitudeHer sudden presence, long-pursued,Unto his gaze would stand confessed:The awful moonlight of her breastCome, high with majesty, and holdHis heart's blood till his heart grew cold,Unpulsed, unsinewed, all undone,And snatch his soul to Avalon.