The Hamadryad.

Last night I was like one who prayed Beneath a mystic tree Whose windless leaves a murmur made, As if it there might be A spirit in the sap that laid Its spell on them and me. A creature who, invisible, In sorrow and in mirth, Through summer's heat or when the chill Is on the dreaming Earth, Sings as in sleep divinely still The secret of its birth. (And as it sings, possessed, apart From all things far and near, The music of its own strange heart Is all it seems to hear, As if its ardour made an art Of its own atmosphere. Still none who come there hear the song Until their souls are bowed Beneath the mystic boughs, among Whose living leaves a crowd Of spirit voices, weak and strong, Sing all that God allowed). Oh! wondrous was that faery strain, Too holy to be heard But by the soul with no profane Imagination stirr'd — Like a seer when his heart and brain Are in the coming word, And he bows low before the breath Of that which, as a flame, All that he is illumineth And calls him as by name, When one to him are Life and Death, One honour and one shame. Ah! so possessed I heard them sing, The many voices who Were the sense of a secret thing That with the tree-life grew, As it did from the same seed spring And a dream-breath from it drew — The mystic life which God had shut Within the dark seed's core, Diverse from all that He had put In others evermore — No hint of death behind it, but Of life that is before! The tree-life in more lives than this — Of that it sings for aye — And as I listened the world's hiss In silence died away, And the perfect life for all that is Like a dream on me lay.