Among good citizens, I praise
Again a woman whom I knew and know,
A citizen whom I have seen
Most heartily, most patiently
Making God’s mind,
A citizen who, dead,
Yet shines across her white-remembered ways
As the nearness of a light across the snow....
My Celia, mystical, serene,
Laughing and kind.
And still I hear among New Hampshire trees
Her happy speech:
“Democracy is beauty’s inmost reach.”
And still her voice announces plain
The mystic gain
Of friends from adversaries and of peace from pain:
Beauty’s control
Of every soul
Surrendering in victory.
.... Well I recall how she explained to me
With sunlight on her head
When last we looked, as many times before,
Over those hundred foothills rolling like the sea.
“Where mountains are, door after door
Unlocks within me, opens wide
And leaves no difference in my heart,” she said,
“From anything outside.”
Not only Celia, speaking, taught me these
The tenets of her beauty; but her life was such
That I believed as by a palpable touch
That heals and tends.
Not better nor more learned nor more wise
In many ways than others of my friends,
Celia was happier.
Their excellencies and their destinies
Became, contributing, a part of her,
Anointed her awhile among all men
An eminent citizen,
A generous arbiter.
Not less bereaved than others of my friends,
Celia was lovelier.
And now, though something of her dies,
Her heart of love assembles and transcends
Laws, letters, personalities,
Beginnings, passages and ends.
Often I start and look beside me for the stir
Of her sweet presence come again.
I have cried out to her,
So vivid has begun
Some dear-remembered sentence in her voice.
If a deluded wakeful thrush,
Seeing a light in a window, sings to the sun,
Yet he shall soon rejoice;
When the great dawn of day
Opens a thousand windows into one.
On a path where thrushes wake—called Celia’s Way—
Time after time
She led me high among the rills.
And always when I pass again our chosen pine
And feel upon my brow the fine
Soft pressure of an unseen web and brush
It from my face expectantly and climb
Wide-eyed into the mountains’ windy hush,
Among the green and healing hills
I have found Celia.
For the morning fills
With her and afternoon and twilight. She is always there
As sweet within me as the intimate air.
We are together still in the deep solitude
Which is the essence of all companies,
Not in its loneliness but in its brood
Of presences, the dawn chanting with birds, the trees
Translating unremembered memories
Of the returning dead.
And Celia, who has learned to die,
Is well aware—and so through her am I—
That, one by one interpreted,
All hopes and pains and powers
Are hers and mine to try
On every star, through every age.
.... And, still together, on this page
We quote the sun-dial of the sage:
”_I number none but happy hours._”
For we remember still
The morning-hymn we heard: “Ye shall fulfill
Your destiny and joy,
Each in the other, both in that Italian boy
And he in you, like flowers in a hill.”
She said to me one day, where a hill renewed its flowers,
“How easy it would be to live and die
If we would only see the ultimate
Oneness of life, quicken
Our hearts with it and know that they who hate
And strike become by their own blow the stricken!”...
“A stranger might be God,” the Hindus cry.
But Celia says, importunate:
“Everyone must be God and you and I.”