THE SCHOOLHOUSE WINDOWS by EDWARD ROWLAND SILL

HOPE builded herself a palace
At the heart of the oak-roofed town,
And out of its airy windows
Her happy eyes looked down:

Her eyes -- the beautiful eyes of Hope --
All day were shining there,
And the morning heard her merry songs
Ring out on the fresh sea-air.

Full many a changing face has she
For the changing earth below,
And to each the magical windows
A different picture show.

As when you stand in the twilight
And watch through the darkling pane,
Till the image of your face appears
Against the fading plain,

And a wider world is opened, --
The ghost of the firelit room
That wavers and glows and glimmers
Beyond in the hollow gloom, --

Till, out through the mirrored phantoms,
The stars and the spectral trees
Are the dim and columned corridors
Of wonderful palaces,

So each of the childish faces
That looks out into the air,
Through an image of itself must see
That colors all things there;

And the hill and the azure water
Can never be twice the same,
For the hue of the seeing eye will tint
Its vision in dust or flame.

Our lives are but what we see them;
Bright, if the eye-beams are: --
Not what shines in, but what shines out,
Makes every world a star.

So when at the schoolhouse windows
They stand, the guileless wise,
I peer o'er the clustered shoulders,
And see with their own bright eyes.

Then the vanishing mists of morning
Like airy portals ope,
And the hills that lift their slopes beyond
Are the boundless realms of Hope.

The slim ships, out of the western haze,
Come moving, dim and still,
As if the sights of the solemn sea
Had awed them like a spell.

And as a quiet, land-locked bay
Their schooldays seem to be,
And they long, through the gate of golden years,
To pass to the world's wide sea.

Then we look from the sunny windows
On the lives that plod below,
Who guess not how, to us, their ways
'Twixt blooming gardens go;

And we see how every toiling life
May look serene and fair,
If the soul but climb above itself
And gaze from the upper air.

But the master, after school is done,
And the children are all away,
He reads in the window-panes the thoughts
That have winged from them all day.

As he watches the loud troop homeward,
Till the pattering feet are still,
He reads the innocent musings
That the crystal tablets fill.

There one had leaned and listened,
And heard in the empty air
Invisible armies marching
To the soundless trumpet's blare.

And one had caught the motion
Of the great world round the sun,
Till he felt on his face the rush of space
As the whirling Earth-ball spun.

The dream and the aspiration;
The glimpse of the higher home;
The noble scorn of the world that is,
And the worship of that to come:

The thirst for a life diviner,
And the sigh of self-despair,
That rose through the blue to the gate of heaven
And was answered like a prayer.

Ah, for him the panes are crowded
With the volumes of such lore,
And the children will catch, to-morrow,
The glimmers of days before;

Till the dry and dreary lesson
In luminous letters shines,
Where the magical schoolhouse windows
Have written between the lines.

But the brightest of all the windows
In the palace of Hope so fair,
Are the eyes where merry thoughts climb up
And beckon each other there.

There are clear and sea-blue windows
Behind whose pencilled bars
The bright hours are all sunshine,
And the dark ones lit with stars:

And there are shady casements,
That gentle secrets keep,
And you seek in vain through the clouded pane
If the spirit wake or sleep:

And oriels gray, where, cool and still,
The soul leans out to see,
As you shape for the prince the sword and crown
Of the king that is to be.

The years of the unknown future
Even now are on the wing,
Like a flight of beautiful singing birds
From the distance hastening.

O children, O blind musicians,
With powers beyond your ken,
Moulding, but guessing not, the souls
That shall wear your faces then --

Shall the look be clear with truth, or drear
And hollow with mocking days?
Shall the eyes be sweet with the love of man,
Or shrunk with the lust of praise?

And what, from those future windows,
Shall the magical pictures be? --
The scattered wrecks of fleets of care,
Or a blessed argosy?

Perchance when ye come and stand and muse
On the years that were half in vain,
A mist that is not of the ocean born
May be blurring the window-pane.

And one may sigh to remember
The old-time wishes there,
And the bows of empty promise
That have broken in the air.

And some shall wonder and wonder,
As they think of the days of old,
How their world from the schoolhouse windows
Could have looked so bare and cold:

For the mist that was thick at morning,
From the noon shall have risen and fled,
And the air shall be full of fragrance now,
From the blossoms that it fed.

O friends, have the paths grown empty?
Do the winds play out of tune?
Have the early gleams of glory gone
From the sober afternoon?

Then follow the little footprints
Out from your care and pain,
And the world from the schoolhouse windows
Will look all young again.

Oh, the never-forgotten schooldays!
Whose music, fresh and pure,
Is woven of hints of songs to come,
Like a beautiful overture --

When the spirit had not touched its bounds
Of weakness or of sin,
But the nebulous light was round it still
Of the soul it might have been.

Oh, the old earth will be Eden,
Fairer than that of yore,
When the young hearts all shall grow to be
What the good God meant them for!

We are all but His schoolchildren,
And earth is our schoolhouse now,
Where duties are set for lessons --
Whose windows are midnight's blue.

And out through that starry casement,
Some night when the skies are clear,
We shall watch the mists of time lift up
And the hills of heaven appear.

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