Poems of Nature, Poems Subjective and Reminiscent and Religious Poems, Complete

SWEET FERN.

     The subtle power in perfume found
     Nor priest nor sibyl vainly learned;
     On Grecian shrine or Aztec mound
     No censer idly burned.

     That power the old-time worships knew,
     The Corybantes' frenzied dance,
     The Pythian priestess swooning through
     The wonderland of trance.

     And Nature holds, in wood and field,
     Her thousand sunlit censers still;
     To spells of flower and shrub we yield
     Against or with our will.

     I climbed a hill path strange and new
     With slow feet, pausing at each turn;
     A sudden waft of west wind blew
     The breath of the sweet fern.

     That fragrance from my vision swept
     The alien landscape; in its stead,
     Up fairer hills of youth I stepped,
     As light of heart as tread.

     I saw my boyhood's lakelet shine
     Once more through rifts of woodland shade;
     I knew my river's winding line
     By morning mist betrayed.

     With me June's freshness, lapsing brook,
     Murmurs of leaf and bee, the call
     Of birds, and one in voice and look
     In keeping with them all.

     A fern beside the way we went
     She plucked, and, smiling, held it up,
     While from her hand the wild, sweet scent
     I drank as from a cup.

     O potent witchery of smell!
     The dust-dry leaves to life return,
     And she who plucked them owns the spell
     And lifts her ghostly fern.

     Or sense or spirit? Who shall say
     What touch the chord of memory thrills?
     It passed, and left the August day
     Ablaze on lonely hills.