Sharlot Mabridth Hall

“ THE GREATER FLAG Fling out its folds to the winds of earth from every crest and crag,
Roll strong salute from a million throats to honor this greater flag;
The flag of a larger freedom, the flag of a wider trust,
From the Arctic snow-peaks circling to the sun-scourged desert dust:
Flower of the New World’s morning; noon promise and prophesy,
Spanning the reach of endeavor into the vast To Be:
Broadening its stripes that their shadow shelter a mightier brood,
A nation reckoned of nations, fearless of temper and mood.
Never the past forgetting, to the hope of the past still true ”

“ Let me look once more on the grand old peaks
Ere my summons comes to go;
For I start tonight on a stranger trail
Than any our feet have trod—
With never a blaze to mark the way,
Nor a footstep pressed on the sod.
’Tis an old, old road, but who passes there
Goes out in the dark alone;
With no hail from the comrades gone before,
And the camping-grounds unknown;
There’s never a guide for love or gold
Would lead you along that track,
And you needn’t tighten your cartridge belt,
Nor diamond hitch the pack.
What foes may lurk in the shadows dark
No mortal hand can stay ”

“ THE PINES OF THE MOGOLLONES In the forests on the mountains sing the pines a wondrous measure,
As the wind, the master-player, sways their branches to and fro:
Varied music, full of power, full of passion, joy, and sorrow;
Wild and loud with pain and heart-break, then with love and gladness low.
And that music holds the story of the world since its first waking;
Holds the secret of all living and the life that yet will be;
All the lore the wind has gathered as he roamed the wide earth over,
From the silent, sun-white desert to the restless, moaning sea. ”

“ Preying upon the frightened souls of men;
But a near friend, whose hand upon our own
Touches to strengthen, and whose shadow is
Like the one tree within a sun swept waste.
Hope giver, healer, they who would upbraid
Thy name and coming know not thee nor life;
But we who work here in the dark, we know.
We know whose name gives courage for the fight;
Whose call rings “Forward” down the lagging line.
Captained by thee we lift each day the load
To aching shoulders, take the road once more
With song and laughter and bugle blown
To straggling comrades: “Look you, man, good cheer!” ”

“ Behind above the thundering flight of fear-swept bison vaguely beat
A murmur dominant with might, the trample of a million feet.
That long gray trail! That path of fate! For gain or loss, for life or death,
Driven by greed or hope or hate, it drew them to the latest breath;
It broke them to its giant mold; it seared their weakness to the bone;
It stripped them stark to sun and cold and mocked at whimperer and drone.
And they were Men that bore its mark; and they were Men its service made—
Strong-souled to face the utter dark, and watch with Fear still unafraid ”

“ And though night be gemmed with starry splendor there is never lode star in our sky:
Straight against the winds of Fate we venture; in the teeth of every tide we steer;
High above the darkness that enfolds us burns our guiding hope forever clear.
We are them that fail; our hands are empty; hall and mart and temple know us not;
Power is not to us, nor place uplifted; wit is not of us to plan and plot;
But the wide and lonely places know us; hill and plain and wood and dark morrass ”

“ From the bent blue overhead to the mold where the dark roots grope.
But level sinketh to level as height calls up to height;
Courage is born of danger; the deed of the naked need;
Came Ease to sit on the hearth, dear-bought with the ancient might,
And drunk with her smile men slept and lapsed to a weaker breed,
O men that dream in the lowland, men that drowse in the plain,
Wake ye, and turn to the forest, turn to the far, high hills;
Ye shall win from their unspent greatness the olden strength again ”

“ That long gray trail of dream and hope, marked mile by mile with graves that keep
On every barren hill and slope some stout heart lost in dreamless sleep.
Patience and faith and fortitude were willed to it and justified;
Stern, homely virtues, plain and rude; eternal as the sky, and wide.
Nor ever sea king dared the sea in braver mood than those who went
Strong-armed to wrest from Mystery their birth-right, half a continent.
Gay, hawk-eyed, brown-faced voyageurs, tired of the river’s muddy tide,
Or drawn by whispered, golden lures, or beckoned by the prairies wide ”

“ And out of that subtle union, desert with mountain flood,
[Pg 97] Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no home else had stood.
We will match the gold of your minting, with its mint-stamp dulled and marred
By the blood and tears that have stained it, and the hands that have clutched too hard,
With the gold that no man has lied for; the gold no woman has made
The price of her truth and honor, plying a shameless trade:
The clean, pure gold of the mountains, straight from the strong, dark earth;
With no tang or taint upon it from the hour of its primal birth. ”

“ SPRING IN THE DESERT Silence, and the heat lights shimmer like a mist of sifted silver,
Down across the wide, low washes where the strange sand rivers flow;
Brown and sun-baked, quiet, waveless, trailed with bleaching, flood-swept bowlders;
Rippled into mimic water where the restless whirlwinds go.
On the banks the gray mesquite trees droop their slender, lace-leafed branches;
Fill the lonely air with fragrance, as a beauty unconfessed;
Till the wild quail comes at sunset with her timorous, plumed covey,
And the iris-throated pigeon coos above her hidden nest. ”

“ Ye chased through the mist;
Broken the shrines where
Thy young feet have tarried;
Dust are the lips that
Thy young lips have kissed.
NIGHT Old Heart, Still Heart,
Lying in the shadow;
Lying there all silent
With the glory on thy face;
Feet that have trodden
The upland and meadow
Spring nevermore
To the heat of the race.
Old Heart, Still Heart,
Life is a striving;
Of all that it promises
Work is the best;
Love is a fable,
And wealth is but giving—
Kind is the evening
That leadeth to rest. ”

“ Like the ghosts of wandering night elves rustling through the needles brown.
Night that elsewhere silently lays her spell on land and sea,
Soothing restless souls to quiet in the shadow of her wings,
Here with hushing tone and slow through the rocking pines croons low
Earth-old lullabies as tender as a watching mother sings.
Rest ye, weary hearts and lone; lean ye down against mine own;
Put aside the fret of living and be glad in dreamless sleep;
Lose awhile the vain regretting in the balm of sweet forgetting—
Or remember but the promise that the coming mornings keep. ”

“ Arched low o’er the desert, reaching far
Its weary leagues wind-parched and dry:
So bare and lone and sad it lay,
The gray old land that seemed to yearn
With a human longing for some caress
From its granite barriers, grim and stern.
Shouldering up to the very stars
The strong peaks lifted their solemn might;
And through their rock-gapped pinnacles burned
The wondrous glory that charmed the night. ”

“ A bugle call that rings “Advance, nor fear!”
To every hard-pressed soul upon the way.
Wherever one spent toiler for the common good
Lets fall his tools from weary, calloused hands,
His work is ours,—a trust to further to the fullest end.
No hope that ever warmed a human heart
Was lost when that heart crumbled into dust:
The dreams that woke the sunrise of the world are ours—
Our dead walk with us daily, hand in hand.
But every joy we know to give or keep ”

“ Low-swung across this desert sky of mine,
If anywhere they shine on one who goes
Swift-footed to like end on kindred road.
Yet do I seek thee—asking of the wind,
Old Master-Singer, singing down the world,
Mingling all music in his endless song,
If he has caught some word, some tone, of thine
To stir my silence like a trumpet call.
I seek thee where the tall pines laugh and lean
Against the sun, against the storm and cloud;
For thou art strong like them and swift to joy;
Strong to endure; deep-rooted into life ”

“ The hot, dry, day-time scent of sun-burned sand
Is drowned in sweetness of the blossoming grape,
And pungent odour of the wax-white cups
Of yerba mansa, hedging the blue pool
With a green wall whose every flower
Blooms twice, once on its tall-leafed stalk, and once
Down where the waves like silver mirrors mix
Its whiteness with the red pomegranate stars.
In the shadow of the plume-branched tamerask
There is a half-hushed, honey-throated call,
And from the cotton-wood’s topmost moonlit bough
[Pg 66] Music’s enraptured soul seems waked to answer. ”

“ But Knox the man and the hero still!
For life at best is a hard-set game;
The cards come stacked from the Dealer’s hand;
And a man plays king of his luck just once—
When he faces death in the last grim stand.
Knox had been drummer in Crook’s command;
A devil of daring lived in his drum;
With his heart in the call and his hand on the sticks
The dead from their sand-filled graves might come:
Crippled for life he drummed his last ”

“ The quail call through the tule reeds,
And one dead, crumbling, cactus flower.
[Pg 79]
OUR LADY OF MIRAGE She walks across the desert and the shuttle in her hand
Weaves out behind her webs of light that clothe the shifting sand;
Where her swift footstep passes strange, shadowy cities rise,
And chartless seas roll shoreward where never sea-shore lies;
And where no house was builded nor ever home shall be
Stretch green and peaceful homelands with tender witchery:
Like flowers that bend to greet her soft colors glow and gleam
Of gardens never tended beside an unknown stream ”

“ Look forward where the sunrise plays
Across the mountain’s rim;
There shall you measure fairer days
With me, and far from him.
“Oh! Juan, the desert lies between,
A waste of fear and dread;
Smitten with bitter winds that shake
The white bones of the dead:
It lies between, as in our hearts
Our sinful loving lies;
Think you that earth will grant us peace
[Pg 41] An angry heaven denies?” ”

“ Sunrise, threading the Point of Rocks;
Dusk, in the cañons dark and grim,
Where coiled like a rope flung down the cliffs,
The trail crawls up to the frowning Rim.
A pebble turned, a spark out-struck
[Pg 14] From steel-shod hoofs on the treacherous flint—
Ears strain, eyes wait, in the rocks above
For the faintest whisper, the farthest glint;
But shod with silence and robed with night
They pass untracked, and mile by mile
The hills divide for the flying feet,
And the stars lean low to guide the while. ”

“ THE LONG MARCH REVEILLE Ho, comrades, on the mountain top the sun has touched the trees,
Strike camp and march, the ringing bugles call;
Swing lightly to the saddle with the rifle held at ease,—
We may need it, we who ride to win or fall.
What is living but a battle? What is dying but a rest? ”

“ DOLORES’ OLLA In Mexico the fiesta of San Juan, in the heart of June, is a time of sport and pleasure and love-making. The eve of All Soul’s Night in November is a time of universal prayer for the dead. Friendless indeed is the soul for which no word is uttered then, and dearest treasures go, if need be, to buy prayers and candles for the loved one’s rest. ”

“ Guidons flutter in the night wind and the campfires flicker low,
We are silent with old memories deep and fond;
Up, comrades, cheer the joy of life once more before we go—
Knowing now ’tis love and service and a mighty hope Beyond.
[Pg 170]
THE RACE MOTHER At sunrise I saw her, the woman eternal, the Race Mother;
She stood upon a great, gray cliff—and behind her the forest;
The dawn was on her face; over the world she looked as one seeking—
As one whose eyes have watched long through shadow,
And are weary still watching for one who comes not. ”

“ THE COLORADO RIVER Long, silent leagues of ever-shifting sand,
White-hot and shimmering to the distant hills
Where wheeling slow the whirlwind dips and fills,
Or beckons like some shadowy, giant hand.
Gray wisps of greenwood and mesquite that stand
In withered patches like an old man’s beard,
Ragged and grizzled: nearer, dark and weird,
The river slips along the cringing land,
Swift to possess and loath to give again.
Foam-ribbed and sullen, staggering with the weight
Of forests spoiled, he takes his price in full,
Stern toll for every drop to land and men ”

“ And blend the forest whispers with the song the saddle sings.
O jingling spur and rattling rein, brown earth and bending sky,
We turn to you to brim again the cup of life run dry;
Take toll of all the fancied gain that hard-spent striving brings,
But set our days in measure with the song the saddle sings. ”

“ I have warred with rift and crevice, with avalanche and shale,
[Pg 24] Grappling my barren ridge with the grip of a mail-clad fist;
Storms roll their anger around me, torn through with lightnings pale,
Or robe me in lonely ermine, or garb me with sodden mist.
The stars are my near companions; ever to them I lift,
And grow to their nightly splendor with soul as far and free;
Counting the swinging seasons by the planet’s veer and drift,
Till again the wild Spring-Joy wells up from the earth to me:—
The old, fierce joy of living, all primitive, undenied ”