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The White Bees
by
Henry van Dyke
SONGS FOR AMERICA
Sea-Gulls of Manhattan
Urbs Coronata
America
Doors of Daring
A Home Song
A Noon Song
An American in Europe
The Ancestral Dwellings
Francis Makemie
National Monuments
IN PRAISE OF POETS
Mother Earth
Milton: Three Sonnets
Wordsworth
Keats
Shelley
Robert Browning
Longfellow
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Edmund Clarence Stedman
LYRICS, DRAMATIC AND PERSONAL
Late Spring
Nepenthe
Hesper
Arrival
Departure
The Black Birds
Without Disguise
Gratitude
Master of Music
Stars and the Soul
To Julia Marlowe
Pan Learns Music
"Undine"
Love in a Look
My April Lady
A Lover's Envy
The Hermit Thrush
Fire-Fly City
The Gentle Traveller
Sicily, December, 1908
The Window
Twilight in the Alps
Jeanne D'Arc
Hudson's Last Voyage
Long ago Apollo called to Aristaeus, youngest
of the shepherds,
Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees."
Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees.
Happy Aristaeus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free;
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his pleasure,
till the fated moment
When across his pathway came Eurydice.
Then her eyes enkindled burning love within him;
drove him wild with longing,
For the perfect sweetness of her flower-like face;
Eagerly he followed, while she fled before him,
over mead and mountain,
On through field and forest, in a breathless
race.
But the nymph, in flying, trod upon a serpent;
like a dream she vanished;
Pluto's chariot bore her down among the dead;
Lonely Aristaeus, sadly home returning, found his
garden empty,
All the hives deserted, all the music fled.
Mournfully bewailing,—"ah, my honey-makers,
where have you departed?"—
Far and wide he sought them, over sea and shore;
Foolish is the tale that says he ever found them,
brought them home in triumph,—
Joys that once escape us fly for evermore.
Yet I dream that somewhere, clad in downy
whiteness, dwell the honey-makers,
In aerial gardens that no mortal sees:
And at times returning, lo, they flutter round us,
gathering mystic harvest,—
So I weave the legend of the long-lost bees.