TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

The Book of the Native

By

Charles G. D. Roberts

Boston—New York—London

Lamson, Wolffe and Company

The Copp, Clark Company, Limited

Toronto

MDCCCXCVI

Copyright, 1896,

By Lamson, Wolffe and Company.

All rights reserved

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many of the poems in this collection have already appeared in the pages of English, American, or Canadian periodicals. For kind courtesies in regard to the reprinting of such poems my grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of Harper’s Magazine, The Century, The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, The Cosmopolitan, Massey’s Magazine, The Yellow Book, Harper’s Weekly, The Independent, Munsey’s Magazine, The Chap-Book, The Outlook, The Youth’s Companion, Harper’s Bazar, St. Nicholas, Truth.

C. G. D. R.

Fredericton, N.B., August, 1896.

To

Goodridge Bliss Roberts

The kindly strength of open fields,

The faith of eve, the calm of air,

They lift my spirit close to thee

In memory and prayer.

[CONTENTS]

[I
The Book of the Native]

[Kinship]

Back to the bewildering vision

And the border-land of birth;

Back into the looming wonder,

The companionship of earth;

Back unto the simple kindred—

Childlike fingers, childlike eyes,

Working, waiting, comprehending,

Now in patience, now surprise;

Back unto the faithful healing

And the candor of the sod—

Scent of mould and moisture stirring

At the secret touch of God;

Back into the ancient stillness

Where the wise enchanter weaves,

To the twine of questing tree-root,

The expectancy of leaves;

Back to hear the hushed consulting

Over bud and blade and germ,

As the Mother’s mood apportions

Each its pattern, each its term;

Back into the grave beginnings

Where all wonder-tales are true,

Strong enchantments, strange successions,

Mysteries of old and new;

Back to knowledge and renewal,

Faith to fashion and reveal,

Take me, Mother,—in compassion

All thy hurt ones fain to heal.

Back to wisdom take me, Mother;

Comfort me with kindred hands;

Tell me tales the world’s forgetting,

Till my spirit understands.

Tell me how some sightless impulse,

Working out a hidden plan,

God for kin and clay for fellow,

Wakes to find itself a man.

Tell me how the life of mortal,

Wavering from breath to breath,

Like a web of scarlet pattern

Hurtles from the loom of death.

How the caged bright bird, desire,

Which the hands of God deliver,

Beats aloft to drop unheeded

At the confines of forever:

Faints unheeded for a season,

Then outwings the furthest star,

To the wisdom and the stillness

Where thy consummations are.

[Origins]

Out of the dreams that heap

The hollow hand of sleep,—

Out of the dark sublime,

The echoing deeps of time,—

From the averted Face

Beyond the bournes of space.

Into the sudden sun

We journey, one by one.

Out of the hidden shade

Wherein desire is made,—

Out of the pregnant stir

Where death and life confer,—

The dark and mystic heat

Where soul and matter meet,—

The enigmatic Will,—

We start, and then are still.

Inexorably decreed

By the ancestral deed,

The puppets of our sires,

We work out blind desires,

And for our sons ordain,

The blessing or the bane.

In ignorance we stand

With fate on either hand,

And question stars and earth

Of life, and death, and birth.

With wonder in our eyes

We scan the kindred skies,

While through the common grass

Our atoms mix and pass.

We feel the sap go free

When spring comes to the tree;

And in our blood is stirred

What warms the brooding bird.

The vital fire we breathe

That bud and blade bequeathe,

And strength of native clay

In our full veins hath sway.

But in the urge intense

And fellowship of sense,

Suddenly comes a word

In other ages heard.

On a great wind our souls

Are borne to unknown goals,

And past the bournes of space

To the unaverted Face.

[An April Adoration]

Sang the sunrise on an amber morn—

“Earth, be glad! An April day is born.

“Winter’s done, and April’s in the skies.

Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes!”

Putting off her dumb dismay of snow,

Earth bade all her unseen children grow.

Then the sound of growing in the air

Rose to God a liturgy of prayer;

And the thronged succession of the days

Uttered up to God a psalm of praise.

Laughed the running sap in every vein,

Laughed the running flurries of warm rain,

Laughed the life in every wandering root,

Laughed the tingling cells of bud and shoot.

God in all the concord of their mirth

Heard the adoration-song of Earth.

[An Oblation]

Behind the fateful gleams

Of Life’s foretelling streams

Sat the Artificer

Of souls and deeds and dreams.

Before him April came;

And on her mouth his name

Breathed like a flower

And lightened like a flame.

She offered him a world

With showers of joy empearled;

And a Spring wind

With iris wings unfurled.

She offered him a flight

Of birds that fare by night,

Voyaging northward

By the ancestral sight.

She offered him a star

From the blue fields afar,

Where unforgotten

The ghosts of gladness are.

And every root and seed

Blind stirring in the mead

Her hands held up,—

And still he gave no heed.

Then from a secret nook

Beside a pasture brook,—

A place of leaves,—

A pink-lipped bloom she took.

Softly before his feet,

Oblation small and sweet,

She laid the arbutus,

And found the offering meet.

Over the speaking tide,

Where Death and Birth abide,

He stretched his palm,

And strewed the petals wide;—

And o’er the ebbing years,

Dark with the drift of tears,

A sunbeam broke,

And summer filled the spheres,

[Resurrection]

Daffodil, lily, and crocus,

They stir, they break from the sod,

They are glad of the sun, and they open

Their golden hearts to God.

They, and the wilding families,—

Windflower, violet, may,—

They rise from the long, long dark

To the ecstasy of day.

We, scattering troops and kindreds,

From out of the stars wind-blown

To this wayside corner of space,

This world that we call our own,—

We, of the hedge-rows of Time,

We, too, shall divide the sod,

Emerge to the light, and blossom,

With our hearts held up to God.

[Afoot]

Comes the lure of green things growing,

Comes the call of waters flowing,—

And the wayfarer desire

Moves and wakes and would be going.

Hark the migrant hosts of June

Marching nearer noon by noon!

Hark the gossip of the grasses

Bivouacked beneath the moon!

Hark the leaves their mirth averring;

Hark the buds to blossom stirring;

Hark the hushed, exultant haste

Of the wind and world conferring!

Hark the sharp, insistent cry

Where the hawk patrols the sky!

Hark the flapping, as of banners,

Where the heron triumphs by!

Empire in the coasts of bloom

Humming cohorts now resume,—

And desire is forth to follow

Many a vagabond perfume.

Long the quest and far the ending

Where my wayfarer is wending,—

When desire is once afoot,

Doom behind and dream attending!

Shuttle-cock of indecision,

Sport of chance’s blind derision,

Yet he may not fail nor tire

Till his eyes shall win the Vision.

In his ears the phantom chime

Of incommunicable rhyme,

He shall chase the fleeting camp-fires

Of the Bedouins of Time.

Farer by uncharted ways,

Dumb as Death to plaint or praise,

Unreturning he shall journey,

Fellow to the nights and days:—

Till upon the outer bar

Stilled the moaning currents are,—

Till the flame achieves the zenith,—

Till the moth attains the star,—

Till, through laughter and through tears,

Fair the final peace appears,

And about the watered pastures

Sink to sleep the nomad years!

[Where the Cattle come to Drink]

At evening, where the cattle come to drink,

Cool are the long marsh-grasses, dewy cool

The alder thickets, and the shallow pool,

And the brown clay about the trodden brink.

The pensive afterthoughts of sundown sink

Over the patient acres given to peace;

The homely cries and farmstead noises cease,

And the worn day relaxes, link by link.

A lesson that the open heart may read

Breathes in this mild benignity of air,

These dear, familiar savours of the soil,—

A lesson of the calm of humble creed,

The simple dignity of common toil,

And the plain wisdom of unspoken prayer.

[The Heal-All]

Dear blossom of the wayside kin,

Whose homely, wholesome name

Tells of a potency within

To win thee country fame!

The sterile hillocks are thy home,

Beside the windy path;

The sky, a pale and lonely dome,

Is all thy vision hath.

Thy unobtrusive purple face

Amid the meagre grass

Greets me with long-remembered grace,