Archibald Lampman (Арчибальд Лэмпмен)

Winter Hues Recalled

    Life is not all for effort: there are hours,
    When fancy breaks from the exacting will,
    And rebel thought takes schoolboy's holiday,
    Rejoicing in its idle strength. 'Tis then,
    And only at such moments, that we know
    The treasure of hours gone--scenes once beheld,
    Sweet voices and words bright and beautiful,
    Impetuous deeds that woke the God within us,
    The loveliness of forms and thoughts and colors,
    A moment marked and then as soon forgotten.
    These things are ever near us, laid away,
    Hidden and waiting the appropriate times,
    In the quiet garner-house of memory.
    There in the silent unaccounted depth,
    Beneath the heated strainage and the rush
    That teem the noisy surface of the hours,
    All things that ever touched us are stored up,
    Growing more mellow like sealed wine with age;
    We thought them dead, and they are but asleep.
    In moments when the heart is most at rest
    And least expectant, from the luminous doors,
    And sacred dwelling place of things unfeared,
    They issue forth, and we who never knew
    Till then how potent and how real they were,
    Take them, and wonder, and so bless the hour.

    Such gifts are sweetest when unsought. To me,
    As I was loitering lately in my dreams,
    Passing from one remembrance to another,
    Like him who reads upon an outstretched map,
    Content and idly happy, these rose up,
    Out of that magic well-stored picture house,
    No dream, rather a thing most keenly real,
    The memory of a moment, when with feet,
    Arrested and spell bound, and captured eyes,
    Made wide with joy and wonder, I beheld
    The spaces of a white and wintery land
    Swept with the fire of sunset, all its width
    Vale, forest, town, and misty eminence,
    A miracle of color and of beauty.

    I had walked out, as I remember now,
    With covered ears, for the bright air was keen,
    To southward up the gleaming snow-packed fields,
    With the snowshoer's long rejoicing stride,
    Marching at ease. It was a radiant day
    In February, the month of the great struggle
    'Twixt sun and frost, when with advancing spears,
    The glittering golden vanguard of the spring
    Holds the broad winter's yet unbroken rear
    In long-closed wavering contest. Thin pale threads
    Like streaks of ash across the far off blue
    Were drawn, nor seemed to move. A brooding silence
    Kept all the land, a stillness as of sleep;
    But in the east the grey and motionless woods,
    Watching the great sun's fiery slow decline,
    Grew deep with gold. To westward all was silver.
    An hour had passed above me; I had reached
    The loftiest level of the snow-piled fields,
    Clear eyed, but unobservant, noting not,
    That all the plain beneath me and the hills
    Took on a change of color splendid, gradual,
    Leaving no spot the same; nor that the sun
    Now like a fiery torrent overflamed
    The great line of the west. Ere yet I turned
    With long stride homeward, being heated
    With the loose swinging motion, weary too,
    Nor uninclined to rest, a buried fence,
    Whose topmost log just shouldered from the snow,
    Made me a seat, and thence with heated cheeks,
    Grazed by the northwind's edge of stinging ice,
    I looked far out upon the snow-bound waste,
    The lifting hills and intersecting forests,
    The scarce marked courses of the buried streams,
    And as I looked lost memory of the frost,
    Transfixed with wonder, overborne with joy.
    I saw them in their silence and their beauty,
    Swept by the sunset's rapid hand of fire,
    Sudden, mysterious, every moment deepening
    To some new majesty of rose or flame.
    The whole broad west was like a molten sea
    Of crimson. In the north the light-lined hills
    Were veiled far off as with a mist of rose
    Wondrous and soft. Along the darkening east
    The gold of all the forests slowly changed
    To purple. In the valley far before me,
    Low sunk in sapphire shadows, from its hills,
    Softer and lovelier than an opening flower,
    Uprose a city with its sun-touched towers,
    A bunch of amethysts.
                          Like one spell-bound
    Caught in the presence of some god, I stood,
    Nor felt the keen wind and the deadly air,
    But watched the sun go down, and watched the gold
    Fade from the town and the withdrawing hills,
    Their westward shapes athwart the dusky red
    Freeze into sapphire, saw the arc of rose
    Rise ever higher in the violet east,
    Above the frore front of the uprearing night
    Remorsefully soft and sweet. Then I awoke
    As from a dream, and from my shoulders shook
    The warning chill, till then unfelt, unfeared.

1. Unrest
2. Song of the Stream-Drops
3. Between the Rapids
4. New Year's Eve
5. Storm

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