The Path of Dreams

Sweet-scented winds move inward from the shore,
Blythe is the air of June with silken gleams,
My roving fancy treads at will once more,
The golden path of dreams.

Along the sloping uplands yellow wheat
Is bending to the honied breath of June,
While all the lowlands slumber at my feet
This glorious afternoon.

To balmy gusts from blue-girt breezy hills
The clover blossoms nod with graceful art,
And all the mystery of living thrills
The ever pulsing heart.

A boon to lovers still, the sweet wild rose
Adds perfume to the languor in the air,
And whispering Zephyr scatters as she goes
Sweet atters everywhere.

The wild birds restlessly from tree to tree,
Flit ceaselessly beneath the sunlit skies,
And give a sumptuous afternoon to me,
In song and gladsome cries.

Blue gauze the empty distances enfold;
The stream-fed glens lie bare in loveliness,
And waves of light along the paths of gold
The glens and hills caress.

In garish light the rustling, shimmering corn,
The trembling leaves, the passing winds caress,
And in the heart a subtle throb is born
Of mighty tenderness.

Vague yearnings, tenderness that prompt to tears
And fill the heart with mingled pain and bliss,
Come down to men through many thousand years,
On afternoons like this.

What is there in the vistas, song, and flower,
That prompt alike to happiness and tears,
Unites life's scattered visions in the hour
Of past and present years?

Is it the throb of life on soft hill slopes,
A thousand passions burned to fever heat
Spread out in shimmering glows that run to hopes,
For some fulfillment sweet?

Some half fulfillment yet of vanished gleams,
Of vanished promises when love's wild glow
Made fervid youth a tenement of dreams
Back in the long ago.