Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
Dreams
By Ernest McGaffey (b. 1861)O
Of viewless winds that pass and leave no token of their flight;
With never a tree to mar the stretch of the prairie around me lying,
A dark-green sea, whose rolling waves the sun has tipped with light.
A hawk wheels round in circling sweep through trackless paths on high,
And over the grass the breezes go and the tremulous echoes follow,
Filling the crannies of eddying winds from earth to sky.
Mounting slowly up the skies, on the steps of a hidden stair,
Vague, so vague, as vague and dim as the dream of an idle dreamer.
A curling cloud-wraith, spiral formed, is rising through the air.
The life that is, and beyond the clouds the life that is to be—
Dreams; all dreams; that come and go, as the wind’s light foot-prints over the grasses,
What is my life but a drop of rain that falls in a shoreless sea?