From The collected poems of Wilfred Campbell.

Ode to the Laurentian Hills.

Blue hills, elusive, far and dim,
You lift so high beyond our care;
Where earth's horizon seems to swim,
You dream in loftier air.

Here where our world wends day by day
Its sad, material round,
We know not of that purer ray
By which your heights are bound.

Ignoble thoughts, ignoble aims
Shut us from that high heaven;
Those dawning dreams, those sunset flames,
With which your peaks are riven.

You seem so lone and bleak, so vast
Beneath your dome of sky,
So patient to the heat or blast
That smites or hurtles by;

So vague, withdrawn in mists, remote,
Shut out in glories wide;
The very fleecy clouds that float,
Your dreamings seem to hide.

We in our plots of circumstance
Are prisoners of a grim despair;
While your far shining shoulders glance
From heights where all things dare.

Could we from out this cloak of glooms
That prisons and oppresses,
But reach those large, sky-bounded rooms
Of your divine recesses;

Then might we find that godlike calm,
That peace that holdeth you,
That soars like wordless prayer or psalm
To heaven with your blue.

Then might we know that silent power,
That patience, that supreme
Indifference to day and hour
Of your eternal dream.

Then might we lose, in fire and dew
Of your pellucid airs,
This diffidence to dare and do,
That grovels and despairs.

And dream once more that high desire,
That greatness dead and gone,
When earth's winged eagles eyed the fire
Your sunrise peaks upon.

That power serene, life's vasts to scan,
Beyond earth's futile tears;
Her hopes, her curse, the bliss, the ban
Of all her anguished years.

p. 49

Nature.

Nature, the dream that wraps us round.

     One comforting and saving whole;

And as the clothes to the body of man,

     The mantle of the soul.

Nature, the door that opens wide

     From this close, fetid house of ill;

That lifts from curse of street to vast

     Receding hill on hill,

Nature, the mood, now sweet of night,

     Now grand and splendid, large of day;

From vast skyline and cloudy towers,

     To stars in heaven that stray.

Nature, the hope, the truth, the gleam. 

     Beyond this bitter cark and dole;

Whose walls the infinite weft of dream.

     Whose gift is to console.

p. 93

A Wood Lyric.

Into the stilly woods I go,

Where the shades are deep and the wind-flowers blow,

And the hours are dreamy and lone and long,

And the power of silence is greater than song.

Into the stilly woods I go,

Where the leaves are cool and the wind-flowers blow.

When I go into the stilly woods,

And know all the flowers in their sweet, shy hoods,

The tender leaves in their shimmer and sheen

Of darkling shadow, diaphanous green,

In those haunted halls where my footstep falls,

Like one who enters cathedral walls,

A spirit of beauty floods over me,

As over a swimmer the waves of the sea,

That strengthens and glories, refreshens and fills,

Till all mine inner heart wakens and thrills

With a new and a glad and a sweet delight,

And a sense of the infinite out of sight,

Of the great unknown that we may not know,

But only feel with an inward glow

When into the great, glad woods we go.

O life-worn brothers, come with me

Into the wood's hushed sanctity,

Where the great, cool branches are heavy with June,

And the voices of summer are strung in tune;

Come with me, O heart out-worn,

Or spirit whom life's brute-struggles have torn,

Come, tired and broken and wounded feet,

Where the walls are greening, the floors are sweet,

The roofs are breathing and heaven's airs meet.

pp. 116-117

Walls of Green.

Walls of green where the wind and the sunlight stir,

Rippling windows of light where the sun looks through,

And spaces of day that widen and blur beyond,

Out to the haze-rimmed, purpled edge of the world.

Aisles whose pavements are etched with ghosts of moving

Leaves and phantom branches raftered above;

Wind-swayed arches rocking under the blue,

Breathing under the dim, stirred peace of the world.

Walls of green skirting the high-built heaven,

Dusky pines, poplars clapping their hands,

Arching elms holding the spaces aloft,

Under the wind-swept, argosied dome of sky.

Walls of green. Under their luminous glooms,

Dim and sweet, the fancies of summer lie,

Sylvan murmurs of sun and leafy shadow,

Music of bird and swaying of tenuous bough.

Under here the haunted heart of summer

Hides in its pensive veilings of tremulous green,

Where the sky peers through and the ruddy eye of the sun,

Letting the world, remote, and its roar go by.

Here is the realm of fancy, the poet's land,

This house of breathing leaves and summer and sun;

Where the eye is keen for beauty, the ear intuned,

And the hushed heart glad for silence and slumber and dreams.

And here, chance now and anon when the world is stilled,

And life is afar, and earth of her care swept clean,

Do the gods come back as of old in the gold of the world,

And the elfin creatures dance in their sunbeam dreams:

And the high thoughts wake, and the great ones tread as

of yore.

In olden majesty under these lofty aisles,

Where the woodshade glooms, or the gossamer sunlight smiles,

In the strength of the trees or the wide, blue lift of the sky.

Yea, here they come to the children of earth as of yore,

Bringing their god-gifts, vision and beauty and lore,

Brimming the world with the old-time effort and joy,

And Titan moods of the old world's golden desire.

pp. 122-123

The Elf-Lover.

It was a haunted youth; he spake

Beneath the beechen shade:

“An’ hast thou seen my love go past,

A sunny, winsome maid?

“An’ hast thou seen my love fare past,

Her face with life aflame?

The leaves astir her footsteps tell,

The soft winds blow her name.

“‘Twas when the autumn days were still, —

 It seemeth but an hour, —

I met her on the gold hillside

When elfin loves had power.

“Her voice was like the sound of brooks,

Her face like some wild bloom;

 And in the beauty of her look

I read mine ancient doom.

“And when the world in mist died out

Down toward some evening land,

Betwixt the glinting golden-rod

We two went hand in hand.

“And when the moon a golden disk

Above the night hills came,

Down in a world of midnight haze

I kissed her lips aflame.

“But when the moon was hidden low

Behind each spectre tree;

She loosed from my sad arms and bent

A startled look on me.

“(While wound from out some haunted dusk

A far-off elfin horn,) 

Like one on sudden woke from sleep,

And fled into the morn.

“I follow her, I follow her,

 But never more may see.

The crimson dawn, the stars of night

Know what she is to me.

“I ne'er can rest, I ne’er can stay,

But speed from place to place;

For all my heart is flamed with that

Wild glamor of her face.

“I know her soft arms in my dreams,

All wound about my sleep; 

I seem to hear her silvern voice

In all the winds that creep.

“O saw you not her come this way,

By boughs in waters glassed?

So slight her form, so soft her step.

You'd think a moon ray passed.

“O tell me did you see her wend?

And whence to hill or sea?

The ruddy dawn, the stars of night.

Know what she is to me.”

pp. 249-251

True Insight.

They never know who only know alone.

Who deeply knows must also deeply feel.

Life is a knife ground on a grinder's wheel,

A sea-worn crag, a river-polished stone.

Knowledge for suffering doth to love atone.

O who would not to grim experience kneel,

And feel the fiat of fate's averted heel,

To know in truth the great world's under-moan.

There in her dungeons where her weird mimes flit,

Behind the curtains of her phantom show,

With grim reality for aye to sit,

And watch those puppet-maskers come and go,

Who build the shadow-dreams that rise and fall,

Grotesque, distorted, on life's sombre wall.

p. 279

The House Divine.

Not in the caverned aisles of cloistered gloom,

Or chancelled splendors built in carven stone,

Where censer smoke goes up and choirs intone

Those sad dread litanies of human doom,

That lend an added horror to the tomb;

Nor where the modern dervish maketh moan,

And smites his forehead with impenitent groan,

Doth faith's rare flower of reverence wake and bloom:

But out in hallowed halls of dawn or night.

Where overhead the censer stars outswing,

Eternity and night in one vast ring,

Or hid impulses of inmoving light;

Behind him all the mystery of his race,

Doth man with Deity come close face to face.

p. 280

~ Campbell, Wilfred, The collected poems of Wilfred Campbell, published in 1905.