"ALL TOURS SUSPENDED "
Tins would have been the hour for the coach to arrive.
Flame-bright nasturtiums sprawl and spill Over green tubs. The dog is asleep.
The loch is long and dark and deep And shivering-cool, But no voice calls it beautiful.
Oh, the lost moral force of an afternoon drive l It's two hundred years since the rationalists first held, Hopeless in powdered hair and satin coat, That cascade and hill and Gothick vale Could feed the soul when dogmas fail, Paining it less Than the old search for holiness.
.A lenient means of grace. No sceptic- rebelled.
By this loch, unvisited now since killing's the cry, Let us suppose there came in rough old years A barbarous fellow, rich in unlettered skill To creep and climb and run on the hill And scarcely be seen In his Campbell plaid of blue and green.
Did the land preach to him, the glen divide truth from lie?
Moralised beauty of hills is a manifest error, Darkening the inward eye. My need is to turn To the black cell and to the rapture unlit Where no colo it is for eye or even for wit, No geological trick Persuades the soul it has power to choose and pick Its private journey out from the multitude's terror.
DORIS N. DAtausti.
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