Where you sit in your armchair by the hearth, sleeping long and long; where you wake to look back upon your life lying hushed below you—like one who looks back from the summit of a mountain;

And the children that came to you in the morning have gone from you at evening dusk,

And the lesson of unfulfilled longing is yours, and of the inflow of immortality;

Where they go out over the earth, where the children of the universal mother go; and the wind carries them over the sea, blowing them into all lands; where they flow through the straits and narrows and over the great oceans of the earth, dwelling for nights together among the white leaping crests under the stars;

Where strange faces meet, under other-slanting suns, amid new scenes and colors;

Where light encounters dark, and in their meeting glance lie new social ideals and civilisations slumbering;

Where the mother of them all sits dreaming;

* * * * *

Where the young poet peers in by moonlight through the bars of the tomb of Dante, and turns away with a silent prayer;

Where the artist with easel and palette sits swathed in coats upon a hillside watching the untroubled dawn;

Where the old Hindu feeling the approach of death leaves his family and retires to a hut in the jungle, there to spend his last days in prayer and solitude;

Where royalty dwells lonely in spacious chambers, or moves along corridors past scarlet-coated footmen;

Where young and old at eventide in the dreamy flicker of firelight sit silent, or go away wandering in thought after the brother, the son, and lover of their dreams, following quickly softly with each and kissing the sacred footsteps through the dark;

Where the young mother prays for hours bending over the face of her sleeping child; where the young man dreams all night of the face of his new-found friend and the kisses of his lips;

Where the river glides down by night past the great city broadening to the sea;

I dream the dream.

* * * * *

The wind blows up fresh and cold where the waves are slapping against the jetty; red and green lights skim rapidly over the water;

The cold light of the half moon stands overhead, breaking its way through combed fleece clouds, the horizon stretches misty white like the edge of an ice-bound sea;

The moon pushes her way for a moment through the clouds, to look down upon the stilled scene of human toil and suffering; the wind blows up keen against those who still linger on the jetty;

Keenly it blows away over the waste sea, and wraps itself round a thousand solitary watchers of the deep.

On the wind I ride,

And dream the dream of the soul’s slow disentanglement;