Here is the height of land:
The watershed on either
Goes down to Hudson
Or Lake Superior;
The stars are up, and far
The wind sounds in the wood,
Than the long Ojibwa
In which Potàn the
Declares the ills of
And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful
Of acquiescence.
The fires burn
With just sufficient
To light the flakes of ash that
At being moths, and flutter
To fall in the dark and die as ashes:
Here there is peace in the lofty air,
And Something comes by
Deeper than peace: —The spruces have retired a little
And left a field of sky in violet
With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.
Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;
There is no sound unless the soul can
The gathering of the waters in their sources.
We have come up through the spreading
From level to level, —Pitching our tents sometimes over a
Of roses that nodded all night,
Dreaming within our dreams,
To wake at dawn and find that they were
With no dew on their leaves;
Sometimes mid
Of bracken and dwarf-cornel, and
On a wide blueberry plain Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;
A rocky islet
With one lone poplar and a single
Of white-throat-sparrows that took no
But sang in dreams or woke to sing, —To the last portage and the height of land —:
Upon one
The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,
And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,
Glimmering all
In the cold arctic light;
On the other
The crowded southern
With all the welter of the lives of men.
But here is peace, and
That Something comes by
Deeper than peace, — a
Golden and
That gives the inarticulate
Of our strange being one moment of
That seems more native than the touch of time,
And we must answer in chime;
Though yet no man may
The secret of that
Golden and inappellable.
Now are there sounds walking in the wood,
And all the spruces shiver and tremble,
And the stars move a little in their courses.
The ancient disturber of
Breathes a pervasive sigh,
And the soul seems to
The gathering of the waters at their sources;
Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark;
The region-spirit murmurs in meditation,
The heart replies in
And echoes faintly like an inland
Ghost tremors of the spell;
Thought reawakens and is linked
With all the welter of the lives of men.
Here on the uplands where the air is
We think of life as of a stormy scene, —Of tempest, of revolt and desperate shock;
And here, where we can think, on the brights
Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on
Until the tempest parts, and it
As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:
A Something to be guided by ideals —That in themselves are simple and serene —Of noble deed to foster noble thought,
And noble thought to image noble deed,
Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,
Making life lovelier, till we come to
Whether the perfect beauty that
Is beauty of deed or thought or some high
Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:
Thus we have seen in the retreating
The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,
And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.
The ancient disturber of
Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,
And the dark
Is stifled with the pungent
Of charred earth burnt to the
That takes the place of air.
Then sudden I remember when and where, —The last weird lakelet foul with weedy
And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,
Skin of vile water over viler
Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,
And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,
Not to be urged toward the fatal
Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden
Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with
And terror.
It had left the portage-heightA tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,
Covered still with patches of bright
Smoking with incense of the fragment
That even then began to thin and
Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.'Tis overpast.
How strange the stars have grown;
The presage of extinction glows on their
And they are beautied with impermanence;
They shall be after the race of
And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,
Entangled in the meshes of bright words.
A lemming stirs the fern and in the
Eft-minded things feel the air change, and
Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.
How often in the autumn of the
Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be
With deeper meaning!
Shall the poet then,
Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,
Brood on the welter of the lives of
And dream of his ideal hope and
In the blush sunrise?
Shall he base his
Upon a more compelling law than
As Life's atonement; shall the
Of noble deed and noble thought
Seem as uncouth to him as the
Scratched on the cave side by the
To us of the Christ-time?
Shall he
With deeper joy, with more complex emotion,
In closer commune with divinity,
With the deep fathomed, with the firmament charted,
With life as simple as a sheep-boy's song,
What lies beyond a romaunt that was
Once on a morn of storm and laid
Memorious with strange immortal memories?
Or shall he see the sunrise as I see
In shoals of misty fire the
Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,
And feel the lulled earth, older in pulse and motion,
Turn the rich lands and inundant
To the flushed color, and hear as now I
The thrill of life beat up the planet's
And break in the clear susurrus of deep
That echoes and reëchoes in my being?
O Life is intuition the measure of
And do I stand with heart entranced and
At the zenith of our wisdom when I
The long light flow, the long wind pause, the
Influx of spirit, of which no man may
The Secret, golden and inappellable?
Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date.
Form: irregularly rhyming, with couplets and quatrains.7.
Ojibwa: a native people living north of Sault St.
Marie between eastern Lake Superior and northeastern Georgian Bay.8.
Potà\;n the Wise: unidentified.10.
Chees-que-ne-ne: unidentified.33. bracken: large fern.dwarf-cornel: dwarf honeysuckle, cornus herbacea.40. portage: carrying of canoe across land from one lake or river to another.43. targe: shield.121.
Eft-minded: like a newt or small lizard.133. pictograph: prehistoric rock-wall painting or drawing.140. romaunt: ancient tale, usually courtly or chivalric.150. susurrus: whisper.
