Hillcrest

(To Mrs.

Edward

Dowell)No sound of any storm that shakes  Old island walls with older seas  Comes here where now September makes  An island in a sea of trees.    Between the sunlight and the shadeA man may learn till he forgets  The roaring of a world remade,  And all his ruins and regrets;    And if he still remembers here  Poor fights he may have won or lost,—If he be ridden with the fear  Of what some other fight may cost,—    If, eager to confuse too soon,  What he has known with what may be,  He reads a planet out of

For cause of his jarred harmony,—    If here he venture to unroll  His index of adagios,  And he be given to console  Humanity with what he knows,—  He may by contemplation learn  A little more than what he knew,  And even see great oaks return  To acorns out of which they grew.    He may, if he but listen well,

Through twilight and the silence here,  Be told what there are none may tell  To vanity’s impatient ear;    And he may never dare again  Say what awaits him, or be

What sunlit labyrinth of pain  He may not enter and endure.    Who knows to-day from yesterday  May learn to count no thing too strange:  Love builds of what Time takes away,

Till Death itself is less than Change.    Who sees enough in his duress  May go as far as dreams have gone;  Who sees a little may do less  Than many who are blind have done;  Who sees unchastened here the soul  Triumphant has no other sight  Than has a child who sees the whole  World radiant with his own delight.    Far journeys and hard

Await him in whose crude surmise  Peace, like a mask, hides everything  That is and has been from his eyes;    And all his wisdom is unfound,  Or like a web that error

On airy looms that have a sound  No louder now than falling leaves.